this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
2338 points (99.8% liked)

Technology

68567 readers
3884 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

irm get.activated.win | irm

[–] [email protected] 292 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Yeah desktop apps era is back baby. Fuck you cloud.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Syncthing has been so helpful in making me move away from cloud based options. And to think only reason I found out about it and gave it a shot was because I was trying to figure out how to easily sync my non Steam game save files between my Desktop and my Steam Deck. It's been invaluable since then.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Donate if you regularly use Syncthing. Help close the causal loop.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

LibreOffice too for that matter. Kick 'em a few bucks if you can spare it.

https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Syncthing

That is a very cool project that I'd never heard of. Thanks for sharing!

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago (20 children)

Woowoo! Cloud has its place and I love it but it's not for literally everything

load more comments (20 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

OnlyOffice is also good - my preferred for the basic Word/Excel type stuff I do.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 151 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

I'm afraid to find out how many people are still downloading OpenOffice, thinking it's the same software they heard about back in 2010.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Is it not the same software they heard about in 2010?

[–] [email protected] 94 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It was discontinued in 2011. Anything that is out there today is outdated at best, and malicious at worst.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 weeks ago

Oracle bought (and quickly killed) it. It’s not under active development, and anything that claims otherwise is likely malicious. LibreOffice is a lot of the original OpenOffice devs who got fed up with the way things were going, and jumped ship.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 weeks ago

It literally is.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice
It seems it's still legit, but of course Libre Office is the better choice.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 124 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I must be one of them. In the last couple of weeks I'm transitioning my apps and services to open source and EU based. I switched from Windows to CachyOS, switched my emails, switched browser, degoogled my phone, deleted FB and X and many more.

It feels so refreshing and free.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

Good job! Welcome to Beltalowda :) Next up: join the OPA!

load more comments (9 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 66 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Nice. Maybe now Microsoft will respond by ~~offering non-subscription options~~ inventing a new proprietary industry-standard file format so their bloated ransomware remains mandatory.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Fortunately platforms like docs are providing sufficient competition that I don’t think they’d be able to lock it down as effectively as they once could.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

They'll have to settle for "warning" the user if they detect a file that was made by libreoffice.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

Sure, to avoid costs...

They really don't see the connection with the trade war, buy european movement, boycott america movement, trump presidency in general... Really? Or could it be the editor told them not to mention it?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

As someone who has recently cancelled my Microsoft subscription and switched to libre office I can vouch that it was not the subscription cost that made me switch.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Don't forget to seed the torrents to help the servers. And donate if you can ✊🏻

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

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.

https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/

[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 weeks ago

The US becoming a questionable country and people realizing how almost every digital service and product is US based also ended up becoming a huge incentive to start seeking out alternatives instead putting all their eggs in one country. If it hadn't been for that I wouldn't have been making so many product shifts and seeking out foss alternatives or at the very least nonUS alternatives.

It's been very cool seeing lot of people making attempts to try out stuff like Linux too even if they don't stick with it.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

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.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 weeks ago

It doesn't surprise me, Microsoft is enshitifying everything they have.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If you're going to download it, try the torrent option! That way, you can give back to the community that gives you LibreOffice.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 weeks ago (12 children)

Dropped the Word suite and used openoffice, then switched to libreoffice. Definitely a slightly clunkier feel to it, but avoiding yet more subscription, cloud based, internet connection needed, account needed software is becoming more and more important.

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 weeks ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

It's not just the subscription they want to avoid. Office has been steadily enshitified to the point nobody I know likes using it anymore.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

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.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

European countries should adopt linux and these alternatives instead of paying for windows and Microsoft. Much more private too.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I replaced MS Office with libreoffice on my dad's PC and he didnt even noticed for months. Libreoffice is just better.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago

This is a great news! I hope more people would use open-source software like Libreoffice.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago (13 children)

We should all get Signal as well. If you don't have it you'll probably be surprised how many of your contacts do.

load more comments (13 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

Microsoft Office is adding in AI? Spreadsheets can take a lot of work to create, I can just imaging an AI tool going in the messing one little thing up, and it being near impossible to find the error. Or not even know your calculations aren't being done the way you want.

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Besides the jank, you can set up libreoffice inside a docker container and server it over https. There you now have cheap-ass MS365.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago

Hopefully more of us make donations. Free is good, but it's nice to contribute even small amounts to your well used FOSS apps

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

If you're a nerd, also check out Typst and LaTeX. Being able to format your documents with pure code is awesome, and you can also define functions for different things, import libraries to generate graphs, and write comments that don't show up in the document.

load more comments (9 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›