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
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Here are a couple I like:
Thanks! I'm already in [email protected]
great place! -
It's a bit easier if you have a separate drive that Linux can own.
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Caveat number 3 is the reason I'm still on windows, I take it that's still not an option then.
Maybe it is, idk, but if it works it'll be a pain. If people are willing to switch software, I'm willing to help them.
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I was reading about this solution. My main laptop is a MacBook Air with M2 so I don't think I can run any version of Linux on it. I have an old windows laptop I'm thinking about trying it on.
Would Linux still run fine on an older laptop?
Linux absolutely works well on old hardware. I don't know what your definition of "older" is, but I still use my laptop from 2017.
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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. Thatâs the highest download number since 2023.
âWe estimate around 200 million [LibreOffice] users, but itâs important to note that we respect usersâ privacy and donât track them, so we canât say for sure,â 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. âThey donât want subscriptions, and they donât want AI being âhelpfulâ by poking its nose into their work â it reminds them of Clippy from the bad old days,â 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. âWe 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,â Saunders said.
I managed to get my father in law to fully switch to libreoffice, which is in itself a great achievement, as heâs 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.
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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 just the editor told them not to mention it?
Came here to say this. The headline is misleading, the costs have been there for years. The thing that has changed are millions of Europeans and Canadians looking for American alternatives.
There was another article I saw related to a massive drop (over 70%!) in bookings between Canada and the US. It didnât mention the reason for the drop in bookings. Not sure why the media is so reluctant to cover the massive American boycotts that are underway at the moment, especially on articles covering the impact.
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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. Thatâs the highest download number since 2023.
âWe estimate around 200 million [LibreOffice] users, but itâs important to note that we respect usersâ privacy and donât track them, so we canât say for sure,â 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. âThey donât want subscriptions, and they donât want AI being âhelpfulâ by poking its nose into their work â it reminds them of Clippy from the bad old days,â 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. âWe 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,â Saunders said.
See it wasn't that hard:
- Common sense ?
IDGAF - Freedom ? IDGAF
- Privacy ? IDGAF
- Subscription ?
Let's crack this software or find something free instead
- Common sense ?
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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.
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Some useless nonsense, like generative AI.
This is a very ignorant and prejudiced take.
AI in Excel is an amazing feature that will help TONNES of people do what they never could It can design tables and write (but not insert) advanced formulas for the user.
Sure, you could say "just be an Excel expert", but - for example - my daily work is nowhere near Excel. Learning its advanced features would be a 100% waste of time, just to be able to prep a fancy chart every couple of years. So, instead, I can just ask Copilot to do that fancy thing for me, instead of wasting hours online, trying to figure out XLOOKUP, or some such.
As someone who has taught many children how to use excel, the new AI features make using it easier but teaching and learning harder. A lot of stuff now happens automagically, and that makes it harder to see the reasons and structures and language of how it is meant to work. So doing basic stuff is now trivially easy, but learning to become competent enough to do more creative and advanced stuff is more difficult.
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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. Thatâs the highest download number since 2023.
âWe estimate around 200 million [LibreOffice] users, but itâs important to note that we respect usersâ privacy and donât track them, so we canât say for sure,â 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. âThey donât want subscriptions, and they donât want AI being âhelpfulâ by poking its nose into their work â it reminds them of Clippy from the bad old days,â 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. âWe 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,â 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?
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I managed to get my father in law to fully switch to libreoffice, which is in itself a great achievement, as heâs 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.
Hi, I hope you don't mind me asking how you achieved this, my father is 79 and has Parkinsons with hearing problems, he's deaf in one ear and partially in other ear, so he has personality issues, really can be stubborn and difficult to deal with, been having trouble getting him away from Microsoft products like Windows or Office, any ideas or advice be really helpful and appreciated, ty
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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?
Maybe. I thought and fought for this from the 1990s on my own small ways with no luck and only to see the rise and rise of walled garden, proprietary, bullshit software.
The issue is end users have the prescience of a gold fish, i have zero solutions to that.
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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. Thatâs the highest download number since 2023.
âWe estimate around 200 million [LibreOffice] users, but itâs important to note that we respect usersâ privacy and donât track them, so we canât say for sure,â 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. âThey donât want subscriptions, and they donât want AI being âhelpfulâ by poking its nose into their work â it reminds them of Clippy from the bad old days,â 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. âWe 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,â Saunders said.
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As someone who has taught many children how to use excel, the new AI features make using it easier but teaching and learning harder. A lot of stuff now happens automagically, and that makes it harder to see the reasons and structures and language of how it is meant to work. So doing basic stuff is now trivially easy, but learning to become competent enough to do more creative and advanced stuff is more difficult.
A lot of stuff now happens automagically
Nothing happens automagically. You need to specifically ask Copilot to do something.
makes it harder to see the reasons and structures and language of how it is meant to work
This I also don't fully agree with. Like I mentioned, Copilot won't automatically place formulas everywhere - it just designs them but you need to copy-paste them into the appropriate spots.
So, yeah, you're not writing the formulas, but it's not like the whole thing just magically appears.
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I was reading about this solution. My main laptop is a MacBook Air with M2 so I don't think I can run any version of Linux on it. I have an old windows laptop I'm thinking about trying it on.
Would Linux still run fine on an older laptop?
Lots of Linux distributions are specifically built for older laptops! And all of them tend to run pretty well on lower end equipment. Here's a list that also mentions the specs needed for each one: https://linuxsimply.com/best-linux-distros-for-old-laptops/
Linux Mint, probably the most popular one on all computers nowadays regardless of specs, has a minimum RAM requirement of 2GB with 4GB recommended
they make Linux distros for old tiny Raspberry Pi computers so even if your computer is a hundred years old you'll probably be able to run TinyCore on it at least -
So cool! So you basically kept windows in one part of your machine and ran pop os on the rest? Really cool idea!
Yeah!! I haven't had any trouble with it yet, my laptop has only one SSD slot which is why I did it on the same one. I just switch when I boot up. I have the Windows one just in case I can't get a game to run and to access my work's shared drive (absolutely cannot figure it out on Linux lol)
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No matter who you ask, it still seems like everyone fucking hates it. I never heard a single good word about teams and still its one of the most widely used conference softwares.
We have to do all of our calls on Teams because we work with participants and it's a bit more secure than Zoom (which can have people straight up bombing your call for funsies). And if we're already using it for that, idea is we may as well use it as a shared drive too. An ugly and buggy one.
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Hi, I hope you don't mind me asking how you achieved this, my father is 79 and has Parkinsons with hearing problems, he's deaf in one ear and partially in other ear, so he has personality issues, really can be stubborn and difficult to deal with, been having trouble getting him away from Microsoft products like Windows or Office, any ideas or advice be really helpful and appreciated, ty
Well, I guess there is no universal answer and it obviously canât be some generic method of achieving this,but what I did was to explain in detail how MsOffice is basically just a standard because people made it so out of convenience and lack of true alternatives and itâs not cheap, plus whatever is made freely available by a corporation means itâs actually you paying with your data for it.
Itâs a process and youâd have to convince him to at least allow you to show them side by side or explain how itâs always up to date and you donât have to throw money at it every x years just because itâs called MsOffice202x, because the benefits of upgrading are not worth the money.
It ainât easy, I know⊠but I am also providing support myself when requested, which can become a headache fast, especially with âdifficultâ people.
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For me it was docx. Oo couldn't get the formatting right but libre could. This was back when docx was new and i was in school ao the teachers didn't take off for strange lines or bad formatting.
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For the past like decade the only "updates" OpenOffice has been getting are questionable code comment changes from one dude. These changes literally do nothing, and people have suggested that the only reason he does it is to make OpenOffice seem like it's still being developed, even though it was abandoned long ago.
Why? IDK, but I think it's just some stubborn asshole with an axe to grind with the LibreOffice project. OpenOffice still has stronger name recognition than LibreOffice, so a lot of people still use it.
