"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
I was prompted by this announcement to download it. An office suite came installed by default with this machine, but I want to support their numbers and start promoting it to others.
I've used their stuff for years, definitely solid
I'm an accountant. I use Libreoffice to write complex written documents and manage reasonably large data sets for 40 hours a week for the last decade, and openoffice before that. I encourage my small team to do the same and for the most part, they do. We all have both libreoffice and microsoft suites on our desktops.
It's fine. I feel like it's the humble workhorse that has served me very well for many years with no fuss.
I'm sure someone will be along in a moment to tell us all about how any serious professional uses excel. There always is in these threads.
For my own part I feel like LibreOffice is one of the great success stories of open source.
Why would they call it Excel if it didn't EXCEL over the rest?? Checkmate DORK
/s
Same here, i had a business, 80 employees, 4 retail spaces. I used Open office and then Libre Office. I sold my business. many years back but still use Libre office today
I started on Lotus 1-2-3
What the hell man. Who is still funding this bubble?
Technocratic billionaires who want to enslave everyone who isn’t white, rich, male, and in their little club.
Enslavement is the old, pre-AI mindset.
They want to replace all labor with AI, then exterminate us. They'll start with pointless wars, disease, etc. Then on to starvation and dehydration. And once our numbers are whittled down enough, they'll send in the drones to wipe out any last survivors.
For all of history the ruling class has been 'held back' by one crucial flaw: as much as they detest us, they need the workers to actually do the labor and build the luxuries they enjoy. With ever more advanced AI, that age is ending ... or at least that's what they think.
It's literally 1/4 of the entire worlds stock market and superannuation and investments now... And a lot more in derivatives (bets on how the future will pan out).
So.. the entire world's leaders and financial industry is either FOMO or holding, and throwing stuff into the cash fire in the hope the flame doesn't go out and tank the entire world in a financial disaster that'll rival that of 100 years ago.
Its beyond reckless.
Even if the cookers are right and AI pans out and it does replace 30% of jobs or something - congrats, leaders and finance dregs, now you have an entirely new disaster to deal with that you funded.
I think they'd rather let 30% die than deal with the problems they create
Didn't you hear!? We did it, we have AGI this time™. It's the future bro! This time it'll be different! Just one more datacenter! Just a few thousand more GPUs and you too can own AGI!
NVIDIA is perpetuating it, and AI startups are trying to peddle it, plus the the tech companies are using it.
Oh what a dystopia we live in. We went from companies declaring they have AI as a feature added to their product, to companies declaring they don't have AI added to their products to promote them. A clear sign AI is complete slop.
It heavily depends on what market they are trying to tap in. LibreOffice always was in the Linux marketpalce, where chances are you will find a community of more privacy oriented people that prefer less bloat, less telemetry and third party dependencies. It only makes sense for them to keep an "old school cool" approach.
Wish more companies would be like that, but sadly we live in our own bubble and there are A TON of people that just simply traded in their brains for AI these days.
when i'm finally working again and able to donate to some projects, libreoffice is definitely getting a little love.
I give €3 a month. It's not a lot, but I don't use LibreOffice that heavily.
Good luck with getting a job that pays your bills, and hopefully you love.
I love LibreOffice.
My only complaint using it every day at work is [a complaint against microsoft] how much my company uses microsoft products (but won't shell out for office licenses for 90% of staff) and microsoft purposefully makes their shit not display or read Libre files correctly to try to keep their grubby monopoly claws dug into everyone.
My IT staff is too stupid to send announcements out to a BCC list and causes reply-all waves about once a month so I am not holding out hope that we make any progress as a company towards smart computing.
Oh damn I remember working at a telecom company in the early 2000s. About once every quarter someone would email the corporate distribution list with an announcement that was intended for just their team.
The subsequent avalanche of people replying all with "don't CC me on this kind of email" followed by the inevitable follow up of people with no self awareness replying all that people shouldn't be so stupid as to reply all to a corporate wide email because it can crash the email server followed by yet another wave of people replying all to point out that the person just did the same thing and mock them... Then the email server would actually crash, then there would be an official message from leadership telling people not to email the corporate directory, and not to reply all of someone did...
Then inevitably someone would get back from leave a couple of days later and reply all again telling people not to CC then on that type of email...
It was downright hilarious.
It's one of the perks of the job. At my last company, we'd let those things run their course before cleaning up the mess. It was always a good reminder that the majority of the company is too dumb to be left unsupervised with anything more advanced than a basic calculator.
Glad Libreoffice is getting more attention; started using it as soon i went to Linux a couple of months ago. And now, ive been slowly getting my mother on the FOSS bandwagon cause shes getting tired of MAC
I recently introduced my dad to libreoffice and he won’t stop talking about how great it is. I’m just like. Wait until you try Linux haha
That's adorable 🧔♂️❤️
Been using Libre Office since I moved to W10 LTSC IoT about two years ago. Libre Office just works.
As a person who works in IT support I'm not scared of AI.. I'm scared of Linux and Libre.. Modern day Microsoft don't know how to build an operating system and Microsoft from 20 years ago have no idea how to stop F#%king Excel and word from crashing for no reason.
Microsofts sheer incompetence keeps me employed. Adobe's pure evil business plan also keeps me employed.. Adobe Acrobat is one of the worst pieces of garbage software (alongside Excel and word).
Please keep telling your company how scared you are of Libre! I need my job and I hate Microsoft and Adobe more than you do.
Edit: Removed a bit that doesn't work and is just offensive..
Just grow tomatoes goddamn, asking the whole world to keep using Adobe. Selfish smdh
It has totally nothing to do with Office being a pile of subscription based dogshit
What's "Office"? Did you mean "Microsoft 365 Copilot"?
And yes, the premium domain https://office.com/ now redirects to https://m365.cloud.microsoft/ and there's not a single mention of "Office", the world's most recognized software suite for decades.
This is a PR stunt at the level of X killing the blue bird.
At this rate we'll end up with Microsoft Xbox Series Copilot 360 Experience X II too soon
And you'll pay by the hour for every hour you decide to actually use it
The school I go to demands we use Google Docs (or Office at home) for our work. Boowomp, I'll still use LibreOffice. Fuck GenAI.
I've been using OpenOffice for forever, before it was cool
I used OpenOffice until it didn't work for some reason, I switched to LibreOffice and I haven't looked back.
I used OpenOffice until it didn't work for some reason
Its been unmaintained for years.
It's wild to me that I only ever heard of LO just two years ago. (When they decided to paywall notepad it was the last straw for me.)
Feels so so good to ditch Microsoft products.
LibreOffice is great and nice to see it getting some attention.
LibreOffice is great and glad they are getting the shine they deserve.
LibreOffice is the good stuff if you need an office suite. It can do everything you might actually need and the price is right. But I'm old and retired and no longer have a need for a full office suite. I find AbiWord and Gnumeric all I need anymore. It kind of makes me sad to do so, but I uninstall LibreOffice these days.
On the other hand, openai's codex literally bundles in libreoffice https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/codex-libreoffice/
I hope that is not where the downloads come from
It's not. They don't actually bundle the normal LibreOffice. Instead they ship LOkit, the special embeddable version that's also the basis of Collabora Office. So: different download
For a few years I had a subscription to Office. I thought I was more productive.
But I.... probably wasn't?
It's hard to qualify. LibreOffice always felt like an office suite. "You can do things here." Boom. I did it.
Office was like "But wait! There's a zillion more things you can do! Until your subscription expires at least."
But then I got curious. How exactly do I do these zillion new things in LibreOffice??? They claim to be mostly document compatible, so how do I do the same stuff?
Aha. I can actually do this shit. Turns out most of this stuff was very minor spreadsheet thingamaijggery. Want to lock rows or columns? It's slightly different. Want to do weird icons for values? It's slightly different. Etc.
Very important learning experience!
I've written books and papers in Writer. It does the job well.
Intresting feature they have without implementing it