this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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LibreOffice downloads on the rise as users look to avoid subscription costs | The free open-source Microsoft Office alternative is being downloaded by nearly 1 million users a week (www.computerworld.com)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Interest in LibreOffice, the open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, is on the rise, with weekly downloads of its software package close to 1 million a week. That’s the highest download number since 2023.

“We estimate around 200 million [LibreOffice] users, but it’s important to note that we respect users’ privacy and don’t track them, so we can’t say for sure,” said Mike Saunders, an open-source advocate and a deputy to the board of directors at The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice users typically want a straightforward interface, Saunders said. “They don’t want subscriptions, and they don’t want AI being ‘helpful’ by poking its nose into their work — it reminds them of Clippy from the bad old days,” he said.

There are genuine use cases for generative AI tools, but many users prefer to opt-in to it and choose when and where to enable it. “We have zero plans to put AI into LibreOffice. But we understand the value of some AI tools and are encouraging developers to create … extensions that use AI in a responsible way,” Saunders said.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Is it just me, or do new office features seem kinda pointless or unnecessary?

I use libreoffice the same way I used microsoft office decades ago. Never really cared for 'advanced' or even 'intermediate' features because they are never necessary to what I'm doing.

I can't imagine that people who are more computer-illiterate than me getting significantly more involved in what should be simple and easy to use programs.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

Sometimes I think these little updates are just a ruse to upload our personal information without us knowing. I stopped auto-updating a few years ago and only update when the software is not running correctly or something new is introduced.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Is it just me, or do new office features seem kinda pointless or unnecessary?

I feel like almost all the updates of the last two decades have been:

  • Security updates in a code base that was traditionally quite vulnerable to malware.
  • Technical updates in taking advantage of the advances in hardware, through updated APIs in the underlying OS. We pretty seamlessly moved from single core, 32-bit x86 CPU tasks to multicore x86-64 or ARM, with some tasks offloaded to GPUs or other specialized chips.
  • Some improvement in collaboration and sharing, unfortunately with a thumb on the scale to favor other Microsoft products like SharePoint or OneDrive or Outlook/Exchange.
  • Some useless nonsense, like generative AI.

Some of these are important (especially the first two), but the user experience shouldn't change much for them.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Some useless nonsense, like generative AI.

This is a very ignorant and prejudiced take.

AI in Excel is an amazing feature that will help TONNES of people do what they never could It can design tables and write (but not insert) advanced formulas for the user.

Sure, you could say "just be an Excel expert", but - for example - my daily work is nowhere near Excel. Learning its advanced features would be a 100% waste of time, just to be able to prep a fancy chart every couple of years. So, instead, I can just ask Copilot to do that fancy thing for me, instead of wasting hours online, trying to figure out XLOOKUP, or some such.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

As someone who has taught many children how to use excel, the new AI features make using it easier but teaching and learning harder. A lot of stuff now happens automagically, and that makes it harder to see the reasons and structures and language of how it is meant to work. So doing basic stuff is now trivially easy, but learning to become competent enough to do more creative and advanced stuff is more difficult.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

A lot of stuff now happens automagically

Nothing happens automagically. You need to specifically ask Copilot to do something.

makes it harder to see the reasons and structures and language of how it is meant to work

This I also don't fully agree with. Like I mentioned, Copilot won't automatically place formulas everywhere - it just designs them but you need to copy-paste them into the appropriate spots.

So, yeah, you're not writing the formulas, but it's not like the whole thing just magically appears.