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
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
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.
FOSS software will win eventually. It may take time, but if good FOSS software is being built by enthusiasts then a time will come where proprietary software fucks up. And when it does, FOSS is ready to take it's place. And as soon as FOSS has become a standard in some field, why would there ever be a need to go back to proprietary?
I managed to get my father in law to fully switch to libreoffice, which is in itself a great achievement, as he’s almost 70 and he used to be an msoffice user for most of his adult professional life.
Libreoffice is just great and Europe should start backing and using more open source, non greedy corporate backed projects.
See it wasn't that hard:
- Common sense ? ⛔ IDGAF
- Freedom ? ⛔ IDGAF
- Privacy ? ⛔ IDGAF
- Subscription ? ✅ Let's crack this software or find something free instead
Obligatory comment that endorses pirating software. We need to make sure this stereotype about Lemmy remains accurate.
I'm glad to see foss Software taking off. In the past, we had to be a tech enthusiast to Realize it with an option. Now it's pretty well known.
The large tech companies didn't get greedy and try to be so gross with privacy settings. People wouldn't make the move. They only have themselves to blame.
If you're into music, there's a great open source synthesizer.
I have a job that involves working with spreadsheets. I have Librecalc at home and both Libre and MSOffice at work. I have also had a college course about using Excel specifically. Both really can do mostly the same things but because MS does everything in a specific (backwards) way, people trained on MS who are not otherwise "computer people" can't cope with needing to unlearn and relearn. So the end result is paraprofessionals are locked in.
It doesn't surprise me, Microsoft is enshitifying everything they have.
Love to see it. I haven't used MS Office in well over a decade at this point and I have no plans to go back. LibreOffice is fantastic, suits all my needs, doesn't pack itself with bloat and it respects my freedom and privacy. What more can I want from an office suite?
The funny thing is you can still buy Office standalone but you have to actively go looking for it and Microsoft doesn't advertise it because 365 subscriptions make more money.
Microsoft doesn't want you buying standalone versions of software, but they still have to sell it because there's still a market for it.
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.
This is a great news! I hope more people would use open-source software like Libreoffice.
Hopefully more of us make donations. Free is good, but it's nice to contribute even small amounts to your well used FOSS apps
For me it was about freedom, and not being locked into the Microsoft sphere.
My biggest pet peeve is since it's a suite rather than separate programs, there's only one path for saving files that's saved. So you can't have Writer save to a different location from Calc automatically.
As someone with a lot of files and folders, and a hatred of having to click around too much, this annoys the shit out of me. But I don't think there's any way around it because of how the program was created. It's literally the one thing keeping me from switching.
LibreCalc and python for the win! I just love from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, import json, import re, import urllib.request.
I’ve gradually been switching over. The UI is somewhat confusing in my experience- but the MSO UX+UI is consistently getting much, much worse as time passes
I love Libre so much
Based
I have to say I'm one of them. Cancelled my office subscription and an trying to avoid making the same mistake again. It was convenient though.
I used OnlyOffice thinking 'Hey, this is a really similar alternative to MSO!' Then bugs with slide previews and their ordering happened in the middle of presentations and even worse, memory usage ground my laptop to a halt (electron apps open up with close to 1GB of memory, such as obsidian).
Libre office still hasn't crashed and the slide previews are accurate. The interface has always been a bit...unrefined even with the new tabbed layout but I can live with that.
Hahahahaha nice
I like LibreOffice, but I prefer Onlyoffice.
And IIIIII helped!
nice hahaha
Haven't used ms products in a decade.
My Microsoft boycott was longerIs it the best free option? It works fairly well although I can still kill it sometimes.
I know there's a few other alternatives like OnlyOffice, wps office etc but these might be freemium.
I ditched MS office for Libre long time ago, all I need it for is to open and view the occasional document anyways. For creating or editing documents I like Googles office suite better though
Is it finally the year of foss? I love LibreOffice and started using it years back for personal use not wanting to bother with buying another Microsoft Office version once the one I had stopped getting security updates.
It's like this meme:
Alternative to Photoshop: Cracked Photoshop Alternative to Office: cracked office
XD
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/13/libreoffice_wasm_zetaoffice/
Native Realtime collaboration on documents and spreadsheets is the last feature holding us back from switching in business environments.
Pandas killed VBA for me that was about the only reason I had to use an ms office suite