Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment.
“This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release!”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
LibreOffice breaks download records after GPT-6 Astra is available to the public.
LibreOffice breaks download records after DaVinci Resolve 21.1 is released.
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.
Or we could follow Japan and just use ISO 8601 directly and write 2026-08-09.
A lot of people are not happy about that stunt. =3
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.
