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Discussion (147 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment.
“This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release!”
They're not just saying the absolute downloads are going up, as the OP suggests.
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!
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.
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.
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...?
https://www.libreoffice.org/download-other/
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
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…
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.
The issue with M365 and MSFTs implementation is they did clipping all over again. They force you in the most useless ways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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. )
To better parse office file formats
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?
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.
Oh, and I also have no AI features.
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.
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.
That would contradict the cause implied in the title here.
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.
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.
LibreOffice breaks download records after GPT-6 Astra is available to the public.
LibreOffice breaks download records after DaVinci Resolve 21.1 is released.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Network_Objects
Maybe software just needs to remain straightforward and focused, and we let the ChatGPT and Claude apps handle the AI part of things.
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.
A lot of people are not happy about that stunt. =3
Or we could follow Japan and just use ISO 8601 directly and write 2026-08-09.
https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/BzKdTMyDkDyU.png
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
Yes, no (built-in) AI is now a feature
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49553350
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.
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.
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...
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.