LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features(manualdousuario.net) |
LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features(manualdousuario.net) |
And that's on a newer Dell Pro Max with an Ultra 7 processor, 96GB RAM, and dual GPUs (Arc and RTX Blackwell.)
I was fighting alignment on the doc created manually, after 3 mins struggle I typed in Gemini tab of Google Docs , and it did everything perfectly.
Same with presentations , tools like bento.page generates you perfect html .
I really do not want to go and edit things manually anymore
Oh, and I also have no AI features.
Maybe software just needs to remain straightforward and focused, and we let the ChatGPT and Claude apps handle the AI part of things.
Yes, no (built-in) AI is now a feature
not a call I'd make early on, a preference to disable AI features like Firefox added is maybe a more reasonable call
all we know today is that AI is being used in annoying ways, this won't be forever
I guess it could always be relegated to plugins, but I suspect over the next 5 years the line is going to get a lot blurrier.
Nobody wants AI in browsers, but an AI that can make me the Powerpoint I want without me having to drag cumbersome items by hand? Yes please.
But not having some shitty clippy-like help system is very nice
Libreoffice is free software that's the big point of it. You can mod it and stip what's you dislike. I'd be glad if people developed AI integration with it. One could do that with AI itself. I've successfully modded free software with AI in many ways, adding features to Blender, for example.
This binary pro of pro and anti AI buzz is just annoying. Privacy is important. But AI is treated by some people as if it was some nuclear waste. In fact it's very similar to the anti nuclear green movement. It's an emotional aesthetic response.
They aren't against AI, they just have certain promises made around the product that would be hard not to break if they added first party AI.
Corporations have been trying Star/Open/LibreOffice migrations for literally 30 years at this point. And, at the pace it’s been going, it will probably take another 30 for it to reach Word 95 polish.
It's actually a pretty great software suite.
Write a formula, make a macros, filter stuff, formatting. I'd rather not to Google it. Especially considering SEO made it impossible to find information how to do stuff in editor X of version Y, at best you'd get thrown with crap for other version and have to figure out how to adapt it for your version
It isn't that they disallowed AI, its that they just leave it up to plugins and have no native interface since it violates many of their principles around privacy and local data.
I completely agree that focusing on "scripting" would be great. Clanker proxies can allow their clanker to use it while grumpy bastards like me can stick to Bash to automate it.
Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment.
There's also this, quite related one, showing that the BigAI CEOs are very disliked by below 34's https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/young-people-ai...
And I say "talked," because the jagoffs at Microsoft REMOVED Remote Assistance from every version of Windows used by people who are likely to need it. And MS Office is trash; the more people abandon it the better.
If I can get my mom on Linux... hey now!
But also, you'll notice that giant banner on the linked page. It's because the people "most likely to need it" are also those most likely to fall victim to the increasing number of remote assistance scams.
when did they remove quick assist? i thought i used it recently (within a month or two), but maybe im misremembering. a quick google still shows it as available for home installs.
“This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release!”
The ChatGPT app downloads a copy of LibreOffice when you ask it to make pptx files.
So I've downloaded LibreOffice 3 times this week without really paying attention to it.
Either there's 1m people downloading new software "because no ai", or there's another popular thing that installs this, and is not counted in the "updates via linux repos". One is much much more probable than the other.
It is the first to break a million in a week. Even if it has been steadily going up most people would consider passing that number interesting.
Like how Hollywood is constantly saying each week's ticket sales are record-breaking, because they don't factor for inflation or population growth.
but, if you follow the market on a daily basis, you will be paying attention to the market swooning for periods of time, maybe with a small recovery and then another swoon. New "all time highs" do provide convenient notifications that the economy has now grown from before. Without new highs, your investments are treading water.
This is comparative.
Switching to the monthly view, the downloads are actually mostly flat going back to 2019
I can believe that the downloads record has been broken in the same way that the stock market hits record highs all the time because the long term trend is upward.
I don’t see anything to suggest that LibreOffice is seeing a sudden surge in popularity or that lack of AI features is driving a surge of downloads.
Codex bundles it with the desktop app as well for the same purpose.
Buddy of mine tried to use some Exchange tools to troubleshoot a mail flow issue this morning. Puts in his query parameters (start/end date, and a user's email address). 1774 results, and the table below that shows "No data available." It'd be fucking comical if his company wasn't spending tens of thousands per month on their 365 infrastructure that's seemingly broken in new and exciting ways every. single. fucking. day.
I'd hardly consider fluctuations between 2.2 million and 3.3 million dowloads "flat".
Also, the metric used in the article was "downloads in the first week after a new release", which apparently broke a record. Regardless of the reason behind that record breaking number, switching to monthly dowloads to see if there is a sudden surge in popularity seems like the wrong metric.
What matters more than the peaks are the floors, which are clearly increasing.
Standard Linux software is often obtained through package management. Is LibreOffice self-updating? Is an update counted as a "download"? What about the torrents, Snap, Microsoft Store...?
That alone would be enough to make most with a distaste for AI happy. It doesn’t have to be binary, but no, it gets shoved down everybody’s throat whether it’s wanted or not, and that’s how you induce fatigue.
In their defense “AI” is a pretty nebulous concept.
Really what I want is a “give me 2020 software” toggle. But if we’re wishing, a 2010 toggle would also probably be nice…
The issue is the past few years of AI being shoved into everything with no taste being applied because it impresses shareholders. If you implement it in a way where it's actually useful, people will like it.
The issue with M365 and MSFTs implementation is they did clipping all over again. They force you in the most useless ways.
At the risk of sounding trite there is a kernel of truth to both of these camps and things will eventually shake out. As LLM capabilities plateau and people broadly realize that they excel in domains that don't require discretion or taste the market will settle someplace in the middle.
I'm flexing my PM muscles by working on small personal projects and am constantly asking myself 1) what problem is what I'm building solving, 2) which parts of solving this problem are largely janitorial/annoying, then 3) could an LLM be leveraged (not used, leveraged) to reduce struggle. My golf app and fitness tracker telling me "lol u 3-putted too many holes" or "bro yr sleep is cooked - have you tried breathing slowly" do not fall into this category. Feeding an apartment lease into an LLM and having it enumerate the ways that my landlord is trying to push the boundaries of tenant law does.
In a normal office environment I would guess most people actually want more AI features.
Most people aren’t passionate about hand writing their best TPS reports with carefully crafted prose. They want to get their work done as easily as possible at their job so they can go home on time.
Not if they spend an unreasonable amount of time fighting the AI features. The people I know who are forced to use AI for their work spend a disproportional amount of the time fighting it.
What I see is rather management forcing employees to use AI, menacing them of bad yearly review if metric show they don't use them.
On the other hand, I'm not anti-AI, but I don't want it to be shoved down my throat in any and every app I have. I don't want that sparkly "Enhance this slide" button, "WhatsApp AI" in the corner, automatically generated "AI summary" in Google/YouTube, etc.
However, I'm fine with an unobtrusive "Summary" button in my search results (Kagi), or a tab which I can use with some models (Notion), "use ML" checkbox while resizing or "enhancing" images (Pixelmator Pro), or many small touches Apple enables with on-device models which doesn't have AI written all over it.
In short, I want consent, control and dignity in my workflows. Yes, I'm very against how these LLMs are trained, built and how the datacenters they run on harm the environment we live in. However, I'm not against the tech. I want responsible development of it, for the customer instead of their owners which wants to milk their users like content and cash cows.
Yet there are still many applications without explicit mandatory internet tie-ins like cloud sync. In fact, "stores data locally" and "won't disappear with zero notice" are valuable features to many people!
Just because AI is a no-brainer must-have for some apps doesn't mean it is a required feature for all apps - let alone one shoved in your face every few minutes.
It's worth pointing out that the original Document Foundation blog post (https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/03/yes-no-a...) seems to be doing exactly this:
> The criteria we have listed do not amount to a definitive rejection. The AI sector is evolving rapidly; on-premises inference is becoming manageable on standard hardware; and open models are improving much faster than most of us had anticipated. Should an approach emerge that meets all the conditions, we will evaluate it very carefully.
No doubt, but that future is when companies have figured out proper fit for AI in their product context and preferably with local AI models.
It should not be with the current slap AI anywhere and everywhere approach that uploads and trains on all available user data, which is what everyone is opposed to.
What do you mean here? Normalizing it into ODF format? Does that limit which tools/libraries you can use to analyze it?
Edit for clarity: I am a Rubyist at heart so I reach for Ruby for almost all of my automation, ML, and even now AI stuff. Fro a very long time, I have been able to use CLI LibreOffice to do amazing things. It can read everything, even obscure formats by today's standards, going back into the 1990s. And then once in OpenOffice XML you have one target to parse in your scripting language of choice to do document analysis, data loss prevention detection, and more. All with a clean open source license with no server usage restrictions, unlike MS Office.
To better parse office file formats
Fable 5.1 was presented with the following prompt to do research.
> https://manualdousuario.net/en/libreoffice-download-record-n... states an interesting causality. Generate an artifact that tests this claim. Is it causal or coincidental. ie if libreoffice downloads have been increasing every release then it's possible to claim any recent feature change is responsible for the download. You need to get access to the download stats and then see what other major features could be responsible
https://funny-taffy-f8d6c0.netlify.app/
Conclusion is that the claim is speculative.
(This post was meat written. The report is AI generated content. )
That would contradict the cause implied in the title here.
people don't want AI features leaking into their non-ai apps. I'm not an AI hater - I want my AI app to be able to read and write word docs, but when i decide to open up libreoffice i'm doing that because i want to write something myself, not use AI. i don't need my word processor to bundle an inferior version of what the ChatGPT can do for me.
People who have never known about Libre Office are now downloading and using Libre Office (often without realizing it).
I've had that happen a few times, each with a long space in between I keep things on paper.
It's a great project that doesn't get enough love.
I ask because I also keep a diary and have refined how I store it and secure it, over 25+ years. Only recently did I find something that I like better than paper.
Here's hoping increased usage will lead to improvements in the "table" functionality. Like when you can define a table, and hit tab at the last column will put you at the next row first column. Missed that from MS office.
If anyone else wants to be rid of it (courtesy of astra): Set NotebookbarColorTransparency to 255. This removes the colored tint while keeping the ribbon.
Go to Extras → Optionen → LibreOffice → Erweitert → Experteneinstellungen. Search for NotebookbarColorTransparency. Double-click the matching row under org.openoffice.Office.Common → Misc. Change 150 to 255. Confirm with OK, close the settings, and restart LibreOffice.
A lot of people are not happy about that stunt. =3
LibreOffice breaks download records after GPT-6 Astra is available to the public.
LibreOffice breaks download records after DaVinci Resolve 21.1 is released.
Or we could follow Japan and just use ISO 8601 directly and write 2026-08-09.
It was still working fine for me tbh, but i thought better to update to something newer.
As soon as I saved the document, they all vanished.
Then the developers mocked me for complaining.
Now I just use real MS Office in a snapshotted virtual machine, because it works every time and loads just as fast.
Then I can do stuff to the XLSX with Claude, and work on the spreadsheet in my spreadsheet editor.
What I DONT want is for my office suite to have any limiting AI features built in.
Both Google Maps and Apple Maps changed it for users in the United States.
MapQuest publicly refused, causing literally dozens of people to ask, "MapQuest is still a thing?"
Other map providers will have to make a decision, but these sorts of things have historically been fraught with politics, I think most maps will go with whatever the official source they use has declared
I certainly celebrate mine every time.
When you record an achievement, there is no need to record another one until you surpass it. You can record attempts, but they are now just data that makes the actual record more meaningful the longer it exists without being surpassed.
They're not just saying the absolute downloads are going up, as the OP suggests.
The absolute number of lifetime downloads can of course only go up (but that's even more vacuous).
“Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment”
makes that vacuous connection, hence my original comment.
Yeah, an AI tool:
The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
We don't know absolutely nothing here: there is a new variable in play and this result gives us some evidence of the effect of that.
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[0] It _could_ have done, but something else countered it, though this is less likely according to Occam's razor.
[1] As opposed to reducing interest in the tools. The figures² apparently don't look to support an increase in interest though.
[2] Going by what others here are saying. The linked text doesn't state any numbers, nor does the announcement from the LibreOffice project, and I don't have time to go digging further ATM.
> 1,031,162 downloads
> This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release! These are just stats from our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.
But their weekly stats page [2] does not show anywhere near that many downloads. It shows a small number in the first week, then a bit over 700k next week, then almost a million in the third week. Even if we combine the first two weeks on the chart under the assumption that release weeks might not align with the weeks using in the chart it is nowhere near a million.
Also the mouseover popup on the stats page is showing 26.8 several weeks before release.
[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/02/one-week...
[2] https://stats.documentfoundation.org/downloads#week,version
However, if we take the release date as 2026-08-25 then the 7 day total is exactly what their blog post said.
Also by comparing the week numbers to the daily numbers, we can determine that their week 35 is August 23-29 (Sunday to Saturday). They are using US week numbering, not ISO week numbering. In ISO it would be 24-30 (Monday to Sunday).
The Document Foundation is based in Germany so I kind of expected they would use ISO weeks.
[1] "around" rather than the exact number because this originally was an update to the original comment, but the edit window closed while I was writing it. When you submit in those circumstances you don't get an error and your editing area is undisturbed. You simply lose the editing area. I'm not going to go and add up everything again, so am going from memory of the number.
I still use a laptop with a 100 GiB hard drive - only 80 of which are allocated to the /home/ directory. This would cut into the useable space significantly on that machine. How about Chromebooks?
(and I can also just add that it's my go-to tool for that exact use-case, and used it in a dozen different client projects)
https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/docx/S...
I can see how much we are spending on Claude and codex at meta. Believe me, the AI company valuations are not coming from Microsoft word ai assistant.
No kidding. It feels like by some time around 2015 the majority of the commercial software development world gave up entirely on trying to improve value for users. Given the choice, there’s only a handful of software that I wouldn’t prefer the 2010-2015 version of.
Which products that sell this are broadly popular? I can see some people on HN wanting it, but people I know who are outside that bubble don't even think of it as an issue.
"User-controlled execution." Seems easy enough to add settings so this is configurable.
"No content may leave the computer without authorisation." OK, so don't do that.
"No telemetry of any kind." There are plentiful API providers with zero data retention. If this means no data of any kind, even just records of having accessed the API, then local inference is a thing.
"No dependence on a single provider." Trivial. The OpenAI API is a de facto standard implemented by tons of providers. If you really want to go broad, it's easy to implement clients for other APIs too.
"No compromises on format." I don't even understand how this would be a problem in the first place. Text goes in, text comes out. The client can put it into whatever format it wants.
"Entirely optional." Trivial to add an off switch. Or an on switch, so it's off by default. If it must be completely removable and not just turned off, it can be implemented as an extension.
The numbers graph is spiky and I can imagine you could argue either way that they are generally trending up or not. But that's irrelevant!
So I fail to see this discussion as anything but sophistry until anyone demonstrates that the download numbers are totally ordinary. It's typical HN contrarianism without any value, because it's enough to argue for the possibility of something, even when the data for checking it is easily accessible.
That's then what tempfile was questioning how it contradicted smokel's claim (because it doesn't, just an imagined claim). Your points, that if the number of weekly downloads isn't actually consistently increasing then this could still be meaningful, are valid - but irrelevant to tempfile who was wasn't arguing that this is meaningless; you should argue that to smokel instead.
