The number of weekly downloads has simply been increasing over time, due to growing popularity. Calling each new high "record-breaking" is a bit meaningless.
Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment.
It's the tried and true headline method of "event 2 happened after event 1", implying a causal effect between the two, despite no evidence of such effect existing. Technically the headline is correct, in the same way that "Canada Tariffs $20b in US Goods After Amazon Plane Crash" is also correct.
It is actually no correct. A record by definition is an unsurpassed accomplishment or statistic. It needs to be an accomplishment before it can be called a record. The passage of time does not qualify as a record. Also, a statistical certainty cannot be called a record.
The year 2025 progressed to 2026. Never in the history of the Gregorian calendar have we EVER made it to 2026. That is an accomplishment. That is a record.
But still nice to hear. Really timely, too, since my 83-year-old mom called me the other day to help her E-mail a document she prepared in LibreOffice. I installed it on her (seldom-used) computer years ago. So I talked her through E-mailing it with Thunderbird.
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.
>because the jagoffs at Microsoft REMOVED Remote Assistance from every version of Windows used by people who are likely to need it.
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.
the stock market goes up and down daily, but with a functioning economy it will overall be up. from a distance you are right, something that keeps going up keeps achieving new highs.
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.
I'm planning to make a killing when somebody unretires me to fix all the issues.. Or maybe not, I hope my retirement accounts are so large I can laugh at their "piddly $500/hr offer".
The hourly pay will be $1200, no less. Thanks to inflation this amount will cover just about the cost of two second-hand teabags and a mouldy lump of bread.
Banks are known for running mainframes which handle dates differently and will not be rolling over. The ones that use unix are likely to 64 bit systems that won't roll over.
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.
If anything, it would be seeing a surge because of AI. LibreOffice cli is the go to method for doing office documents -> pdf -> image rendering for agent doc rendering feedback.
Companies are totally blind to the fact that A.I. is a complete turn-off to many customers. Not having / using A.I. may even become a unique selling point in the future.
The thing is, all they really have to do is add an off switch for AI features so they’re not taking up space in the UI and aren’t consuming any extra resources. This toggle should also hide aggressive AI promotions in places like launch screens.
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.
They shouldn't and they won't. That will introduce a new metric -- %user disabling AI, and it will definitely be non-zero, which threatens the "everyone loves AI" narrative, which is the only thing thats floating all the tech-related valuation right now.
Although, some services have started labeling their old natural language processing functionality “AI,” and released additional “AI” features, so an off switch isn’t always possible. The options seem to be to lose previously existing functionality or gain current anti-features.
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…
> 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.
Most people don't care that much. When I read some comments on Mastodon I get the impression that people absolutely hate it, then I'm reading some comments on X and people love it and build things with it. Then I'm talking to friends and they are excited about what ChatGPT can do for them and don't even think about the bigger picture outside of a "AI will take our jobs haha" joke.
How many, though? It looks to me like the anti-AI crowd is not all that big, but it’s a bubble so they think everyone thinks that way. Especially if we’re talking about people who are so rabidly against it that they’ll get upset about optional AI features that are completely ignorable.
Conversely, a no-AI ethos is one that will very likely need to be walked back at some point in the future for tech products. AI isn't going anywhere, so finding ways to use it constructively with your product is going to be a far better long term strategy. For now while it's new and scary and there's a lack of regulation and governance and ethical considerations - I can see why an anti-AI stance is popular, but it's not durable long term.
The internet has been around for quite a while now, and is absolutely critical for a lot of applications. Most people would never give up the internet.
Yet there are still many applications without explicit mandatory internet tie-ins like cloud sync. In fact, "stores data locally" and "won't disappear with zero notice" are valuable features to many people!
Just because AI is a no-brainer must-have for some apps doesn't mean it is a required feature for all apps - let alone one shoved in your face every few minutes.
Which products that sell this are broadly popular? I can see some people on HN wanting it, but people I know who are outside that bubble don't even think of it as an issue.
I'm a big supporter of LibreOffice, Codeberg, SourceHut, etc. on what they do, tell and defend, and I'm with them.
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.
I really appreciate this comment since it very effectively communicates how I feel about the subject, since I have been struggling with putting it into such clear language.
> 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.
That list seems pretty easy to meet today. I’m not sure why they’re waiting for an approach to emerge instead of building it now, unless there’s something else they haven’t listed.
I don't think there's enough information accurately assess this. Anti-AI movements might grow much larger than today, given AIs potential to replace jobs faster than we have the ability to create them. The movement could even result in AI going somewhere.
> is one that will very likely need to be walked back at some point in the future for tech products
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.
> Companies are totally blind to the fact that A.I. is a complete turn-off to many customers.
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.
> I would guess most people actually want more AI features.
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.
The TPS reports are written with the sender's AI and then read and summarized with the recipient's AI. At this point it would make more sense to just write the TPS reports in MCP.
I have an app with several AI features that I will not mentioning use AI at all because its completely irrelevant and the users will hate it for no reason.
This is awesome! I have used LibreOffice (and Open Office) extensively for decades now. It is my real office suite I use for real work and real business accounting tasks. Yes, I am very well aware that Calc is different than Excel but it can get nearly all the same tasks done as long as you are not tied deep into a corporate environment passing Excel-specific files around. I have also made great business uses of it in Docker too, generating perfect PDFS from templates, and normalizing document formats for analysis. I donate a modest $19/month personally to the foundation, much rather pay them than Microsoft!
Bundling in codex isn’t going to increase the download count on their website. Unless you’re assuming that every codex install downloads a fresh non-cached copy.
They have absolutely zero regard for system resources. I understand why, but such things were once considered unfeasible - and very recently were also considered undesirable.
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?
I don't see not having AI as a feature, but I'd prefer for them to take the approach of optional, easy to implement interfaces that increase the ability for the suite to be 'scripted' rather than implement AI directly. My motivation is that the field of AI is moving so fast I think its a better long term plan to make your software something that can be automated with AI than to try to fight the speed of that innovation curve. I get that even that can be difficult because of security concerns, but it seems more straightforward than implementing models directly into your application.
That is, in fact, exactly what they explain as their approach in the article, as well as their reasoning behind it.
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.
I absolutely see a lack of soulless clankers to be a feature.
I completely agree that focusing on "scripting" would be great. Clanker proxies can allow their clanker to use it while grumpy bastards like me can stick to Bash to automate it.
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.
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.
Didn't people find it bundled with a bunch of other things in a single runtime? Downloaded as part of a whole runtime would suggest it wasn't downloaded directly from the source.
I think it's not baked into codex, but codex has either been instructed to download it when asked to edit word docs/excel spreadsheets, or it picked it up during training.
I've been using Libreoffice to store my diary for years -- IIRC they use blowfish on the crypto side of things? I had a weird issue a while back where I'm not sure if I forgot my diary's password, or the file got corrupted.
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.
Why Libreoffice? Does your diary contain advanced formatting, tables, images, or other involved content? Or just for the encryption?
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.
Both Codex and Claude (on the web) use LibreOffice to edit docs, so not sure you can really conclude it broke download records because end users didn't want AI in Office and went with LibreOffice instead
Maybe it's just a secret cabal of rogue agents downloading LibreOffice for no particualr reason whatsoever? I mean there is a precedent already: those fellas hijacked some poor wiki.
But they support AI features, like LanguageTool. I always bought Softmaker but since they don't offer this feature in their One-time purchase version, I have started using LibreOffice only.
I came here to say that this is extraordinarily uninteresting. But some useful thought came out of it: all "AI" features are moving into the generalized agent harness anyways, and good software often maintains a focus. Take Windows, for example. It has a rather broad job being an OS, but as a product it's a good example of loosening focus. it's losing consistency in its opinions about where updates should happen, how settings should apply, which menus are in charge, and even what the design philosophy is. And that bleeds out into the user surface too. Windows 11 is a scattered mess that's increasingly just a surface for finding new ways to pull your attention into ads.
Maybe software just needs to remain straightforward and focused, and we let the ChatGPT and Claude apps handle the AI part of things.
this is temporary marketing towards a direction that they may change their mind on in the future, which would likely anger people who downloaded it because of this preference
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
Offtopic blogging tip: Americans will read dates like "8/9/2026" as "August 9, 2026." I'm pretty sure the author is using the (more sensible) convention of day/month/year but expressing dates as e.g. "08-Sep-2026" removes the ambiguity.
Another reason why it might be hitting records is many companies getting rid of Microsoft 365 downloads for desktop and only allowing use of the web version. And apparently it's the first thing that comes up when you try to download Microsoft 365? People don't try to pirate it anymore, they just download LibreOffice
Or people outside the US distrusting US technology? There is a confluence of trends pointing away from US based tech. It will take a crazy amount of work to restore trust.
Hopefully LibreOffice is one of the projects that gets free Pro Max accounts from A and O.
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.
You’re wrong. Despite its usefulness in our profession, AI is deeply unpopular with the general public and products that don’t include it are rapidly gaining in popularity. People are tired of AI being shoved down their throats without consent.
Are you speaking from personal experience or do you have data to back that up? I honestly would love to see some study around this. I haven't done my research but --anecdotally-- everyone around me is ok with it or even enjoying AI to some degree. No strong stances either way tbh.
Here you go: https://archive.ph/9erfx bask in that 20% support of "more good than bad when it comes to news" and the 70% thinking it's destroying jobs.
Very annoying that AI is this new virtue signaling topic. I guess it's a step up from a few years ago when it was about naming branches, but it's annoying.
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.
The actual story below the headline is that AI is allowed in LibreOffice via plugins, they just aren't going to do it themselves since it violates some of their principles about privacy and local data storage.
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.
Regardless of the fact that the 'record download' levels is probably due to some other factor, the world is already becoming conscious that the so-called AI is not all it's cracked up to be.
The number of weekly downloads has simply been increasing over time, due to growing popularity. Calling each new high "record-breaking" is a bit meaningless.
Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment.
It's the tried and true headline method of "event 2 happened after event 1", implying a causal effect between the two, despite no evidence of such effect existing. Technically the headline is correct, in the same way that "Canada Tariffs $20b in US Goods After Amazon Plane Crash" is also correct.
"it's our most powerful X ever" - every Apple event ever
God, I'm hoping that this phraseology changes with the new CEO, I am so tired of that overused statement haha.
Didn’t Steve Jobs use that formula as well? The most powerful thing we released compared to last year’s thing we released?
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
The only reason I know this is the West Wing. I guess some TV applies in the real world too...
It is actually no correct. A record by definition is an unsurpassed accomplishment or statistic. It needs to be an accomplishment before it can be called a record. The passage of time does not qualify as a record. Also, a statistical certainty cannot be called a record.
The year 2025 progressed to 2026. Never in the history of the Gregorian calendar have we EVER made it to 2026. That is an accomplishment. That is a record.
From Libre’s announcement (linked in the article):
“This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release!”
I don't understand this comment. You don't seem to be disagreeing with OP?
There is a specific record being claimed.
They're not just saying the absolute downloads are going up, as the OP suggests.
But still nice to hear. Really timely, too, since my 83-year-old mom called me the other day to help her E-mail a document she prepared in LibreOffice. I installed it on her (seldom-used) computer years ago. So I talked her through E-mailing it with Thunderbird.
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!
I use Google remote desktop with my mother. It's not perfect but it's adequate.
>because the jagoffs at Microsoft REMOVED Remote Assistance from every version of Windows used by people who are likely to need it.
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.
What's the issue of getting her on Linux? I bet she wouldn't see a difference, especially if its GUI is similar to Windows, like Linux Mint.
Congratulation to your new unix timestamp record! (and yes, you too, nth reader!)
I can tell you wrote this comment when you were younger.
First!
is the trend of increasing weekly downloads not itself meaningful?
Yes, here's the graph of weekly downloads: https://stats.documentfoundation.org/downloads#week,version The 26.8 peak is within the normal range of week-to-week variation.
I feel this every time the stock market hits a new “all time high”
the stock market goes up and down daily, but with a functioning economy it will overall be up. from a distance you are right, something that keeps going up keeps achieving new highs.
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.
Isn't it also a dep of some AI tools? Or maybe they use their own binary
See also, every new iPhone/Pixel being the best they've ever release. You'd hope so!
What? A Unix timestamp literally cannot ever be lower. Its a completely assinine comparison isn't it?
This is comparative.
False, in January 2038 at least some systems will go back in time
I'm planning to make a killing when somebody unretires me to fix all the issues.. Or maybe not, I hope my retirement accounts are so large I can laugh at their "piddly $500/hr offer".
The hourly pay will be $1200, no less. Thanks to inflation this amount will cover just about the cost of two second-hand teabags and a mouldy lump of bread.
just make sure you get paid in cash before it rolls over.
Banks are known for running mainframes which handle dates differently and will not be rolling over. The ones that use unix are likely to 64 bit systems that won't roll over.
thats_the_joke.jpg
Just wait til 2037 ;)
I found this graph of LibreOffice downloads https://stats.documentfoundation.org/downloads
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.
If anything, it would be seeing a surge because of AI. LibreOffice cli is the go to method for doing office documents -> pdf -> image rendering for agent doc rendering feedback.
I wouldn't say that's flat at all, if you switch to the "architecture" graph it gives a clearer picture without the between-version artefacts of dips that don't exist: https://stats.documentfoundation.org/downloads#month,arch
What matters more than the peaks are the floors, which are clearly increasing.
Companies are totally blind to the fact that A.I. is a complete turn-off to many customers. Not having / using A.I. may even become a unique selling point in the future.
The thing is, all they really have to do is add an off switch for AI features so they’re not taking up space in the UI and aren’t consuming any extra resources. This toggle should also hide aggressive AI promotions in places like launch screens.
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.
They shouldn't and they won't. That will introduce a new metric -- %user disabling AI, and it will definitely be non-zero, which threatens the "everyone loves AI" narrative, which is the only thing thats floating all the tech-related valuation right now.
They will interpret that metric as "they don't love AI YET,so lets throw more at them so they can see how wonderful it is" .....
Although, some services have started labeling their old natural language processing functionality “AI,” and released additional “AI” features, so an off switch isn’t always possible. The options seem to be to lose previously existing functionality or gain current anti-features.
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…
> 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.
Yes, it needs to not be shoved everywhere and try to rewrite your workflows constantly and that would be enough
I would love to have codex plugins into libreoffice like m365 office.
The issue with M365 and MSFTs implementation is they did clipping all over again. They force you in the most useless ways.
Most people don't care that much. When I read some comments on Mastodon I get the impression that people absolutely hate it, then I'm reading some comments on X and people love it and build things with it. Then I'm talking to friends and they are excited about what ChatGPT can do for them and don't even think about the bigger picture outside of a "AI will take our jobs haha" joke.
How many, though? It looks to me like the anti-AI crowd is not all that big, but it’s a bubble so they think everyone thinks that way. Especially if we’re talking about people who are so rabidly against it that they’ll get upset about optional AI features that are completely ignorable.
Conversely, a no-AI ethos is one that will very likely need to be walked back at some point in the future for tech products. AI isn't going anywhere, so finding ways to use it constructively with your product is going to be a far better long term strategy. For now while it's new and scary and there's a lack of regulation and governance and ethical considerations - I can see why an anti-AI stance is popular, but it's not durable long term.
The internet has been around for quite a while now, and is absolutely critical for a lot of applications. Most people would never give up the internet.
Yet there are still many applications without explicit mandatory internet tie-ins like cloud sync. In fact, "stores data locally" and "won't disappear with zero notice" are valuable features to many people!
Just because AI is a no-brainer must-have for some apps doesn't mean it is a required feature for all apps - let alone one shoved in your face every few minutes.
> valuable features to many people!
Which products that sell this are broadly popular? I can see some people on HN wanting it, but people I know who are outside that bubble don't even think of it as an issue.
I'm a big supporter of LibreOffice, Codeberg, SourceHut, etc. on what they do, tell and defend, and I'm with them.
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.
I really appreciate this comment since it very effectively communicates how I feel about the subject, since I have been struggling with putting it into such clear language.
Thank you very much.
> finding ways to use it constructively with your product is going to be a far better long term strategy
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.
That list seems pretty easy to meet today. I’m not sure why they’re waiting for an approach to emerge instead of building it now, unless there’s something else they haven’t listed.
What features do you think meet the list right now?
I don't think there's enough information accurately assess this. Anti-AI movements might grow much larger than today, given AIs potential to replace jobs faster than we have the ability to create them. The movement could even result in AI going somewhere.
> is one that will very likely need to be walked back at some point in the future for tech products
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.
Nobody should be "finding ways to use" any technology. We should be solving problems first and foremost.
> Companies are totally blind to the fact that A.I. is a complete turn-off to many customers.
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.
> I would guess most people actually want more AI features.
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.
The TPS reports are written with the sender's AI and then read and summarized with the recipient's AI. At this point it would make more sense to just write the TPS reports in MCP.
I have an app with several AI features that I will not mentioning use AI at all because its completely irrelevant and the users will hate it for no reason.
This is awesome! I have used LibreOffice (and Open Office) extensively for decades now. It is my real office suite I use for real work and real business accounting tasks. Yes, I am very well aware that Calc is different than Excel but it can get nearly all the same tasks done as long as you are not tied deep into a corporate environment passing Excel-specific files around. I have also made great business uses of it in Docker too, generating perfect PDFS from templates, and normalizing document formats for analysis. I donate a modest $19/month personally to the foundation, much rather pay them than Microsoft!
Could also be due to the fact that every codex install includes a copy of libreoffice
Bundling in codex isn’t going to increase the download count on their website. Unless you’re assuming that every codex install downloads a fresh non-cached copy.
GH copilot installed it for me when trying to read some docs lol
what? why?
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/codex-libreoffice/
To better parse office file formats
They have absolutely zero regard for system resources. I understand why, but such things were once considered unfeasible - and very recently were also considered undesirable.
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?
It's also used as a headless office document editor by openai models so... does that impact their metrics?
I wonder how much of this is also driven by Microsofts current downward trajectory, I and others have switched to linux this year.
I don't see not having AI as a feature, but I'd prefer for them to take the approach of optional, easy to implement interfaces that increase the ability for the suite to be 'scripted' rather than implement AI directly. My motivation is that the field of AI is moving so fast I think its a better long term plan to make your software something that can be automated with AI than to try to fight the speed of that innovation curve. I get that even that can be difficult because of security concerns, but it seems more straightforward than implementing models directly into your application.
That is, in fact, exactly what they explain as their approach in the article, as well as their reasoning behind it.
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.
I absolutely see a lack of soulless clankers to be a feature.
I completely agree that focusing on "scripting" would be great. Clanker proxies can allow their clanker to use it while grumpy bastards like me can stick to Bash to automate it.
I do love LibreOffice, but who thought this colouring is a good idea? https://i.imgur.com/cUzW97S.png
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.
Can you control it agentically? If so it’s has all the ai features I would want. I typically don’t care for built in ai features.
Presumably. The headless CLI part of libreoffice is even included in Codex and Claude Code.
This. I don’t want it to have AI features, but often find myself asking some other AI, “how do I change the paper size from A4 to US Letter,” etc.
Been using libreoffice for years.
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.
It’s also been baked into Codex. Go figure
It's open source software - it can be baked into pretty much anything given they follow the license terms.
The question is whether the 10 million active users of Codex / ChatGPT Work count towards the download count.
That would contradict the cause implied in the title here.
Explains the download records as well
Not really. One entity embedding the software into another will only account for at most a handful of downloads.
Unless Codex is vibe coded and it downloads it directly on every installation…
Didn't people find it bundled with a bunch of other things in a single runtime? Downloaded as part of a whole runtime would suggest it wasn't downloaded directly from the source.
I think it's not baked into codex, but codex has either been instructed to download it when asked to edit word docs/excel spreadsheets, or it picked it up during training.
I've been using Libreoffice to store my diary for years -- IIRC they use blowfish on the crypto side of things? I had a weird issue a while back where I'm not sure if I forgot my diary's password, or the file got corrupted.
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.
Why Libreoffice? Does your diary contain advanced formatting, tables, images, or other involved content? Or just for the encryption?
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.
Both Codex and Claude (on the web) use LibreOffice to edit docs, so not sure you can really conclude it broke download records because end users didn't want AI in Office and went with LibreOffice instead
Maybe it's just a secret cabal of rogue agents downloading LibreOffice for no particualr reason whatsoever? I mean there is a precedent already: those fellas hijacked some poor wiki.
But they support AI features, like LanguageTool. I always bought Softmaker but since they don't offer this feature in their One-time purchase version, I have started using LibreOffice only.
The only thing I'd need and want from my office suite for AI are for it to stay in sync with a disk file.
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.
Clickbait title…
I broke a weight record after decimating a Mars bar. Weight's been about the same for a year.
Suggested titles (same logic):
LibreOffice breaks download records after GPT-6 Astra is available to the public.
LibreOffice breaks download records after DaVinci Resolve 21.1 is released.
Hate to say it but it is because of AI, not in spite of it. Codex recently started including the entire libreoffice package for MS office compatibility. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/codex-libreoffice/
Isn’t OpenOffice called by llms to do tasks?
UNO is for programmatic access. StarOffice ftw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Network_Objects
Why is this website asking me to enable notifications?!?
Anyone tried Numbers? It can't sort a table (only a sheet), and find is scoped to the document (not the sheet).
No AI features is the first feature in years that shipped on time and worked on the first try.
I came here to say that this is extraordinarily uninteresting. But some useful thought came out of it: all "AI" features are moving into the generalized agent harness anyways, and good software often maintains a focus. Take Windows, for example. It has a rather broad job being an OS, but as a product it's a good example of loosening focus. it's losing consistency in its opinions about where updates should happen, how settings should apply, which menus are in charge, and even what the design philosophy is. And that bleeds out into the user surface too. Windows 11 is a scattered mess that's increasingly just a surface for finding new ways to pull your attention into ads.
Maybe software just needs to remain straightforward and focused, and we let the ChatGPT and Claude apps handle the AI part of things.
The last time I tried to use LibreOffice, I made three hours worth of comments on a Word document.
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.
this is temporary marketing towards a direction that they may change their mind on in the future, which would likely anger people who downloaded it because of this preference
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
Do nothing and win
LibreOffice is downloaded by several LLM harnesses like codex so...
This is the way!
false claim of causality (post hoc, ergo propter hoc).
Offtopic blogging tip: Americans will read dates like "8/9/2026" as "August 9, 2026." I'm pretty sure the author is using the (more sensible) convention of day/month/year but expressing dates as e.g. "08-Sep-2026" removes the ambiguity.
The only real sensible date format is yyyy-mm-dd, makes it easy to sort.
Highly disagree that either is more sensible than the other, especially given how each culture actually uses dates in their speech.
Or we could follow Japan and just use ISO 8601 directly and write 2026-08-09.
https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/BzKdTMyDkDyU.png
Another reason why it might be hitting records is many companies getting rid of Microsoft 365 downloads for desktop and only allowing use of the web version. And apparently it's the first thing that comes up when you try to download Microsoft 365? People don't try to pirate it anymore, they just download LibreOffice
Are you sure it wasn't Microsoft doing a rug-pull October 13 on offline Office 2021 pro lifetime license installations for MacOS.
A lot of people are not happy about that stunt. =3
Or people outside the US distrusting US technology? There is a confluence of trends pointing away from US based tech. It will take a crazy amount of work to restore trust.
Related:
Yes, no (built-in) AI is now a feature
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49553350
So related it's in the blog post.
Strange, when office suites are the one software category most people are anticipating better AI integration for unlike everything else.
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.
Hopefully LibreOffice is one of the projects that gets free Pro Max accounts from A and O.
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.
Tell me you haven't used LibreOffice without telling me you haven't used LibreOffice.
It's actually a pretty great software suite.
enough with this anti ai noise resistance is futile it's getting popular due to improved ui
You’re wrong. Despite its usefulness in our profession, AI is deeply unpopular with the general public and products that don’t include it are rapidly gaining in popularity. People are tired of AI being shoved down their throats without consent.
Are you speaking from personal experience or do you have data to back that up? I honestly would love to see some study around this. I haven't done my research but --anecdotally-- everyone around me is ok with it or even enjoying AI to some degree. No strong stances either way tbh.
Here you go: https://archive.ph/9erfx bask in that 20% support of "more good than bad when it comes to news" and the 70% thinking it's destroying jobs.
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...
I'm not anti-AI (I have a ChatGPT subscription), I just don't like bloat and nagging.
Enough with this pro-ai noise.
Nonsense. I can (and do) resist a lot of things. Society in general may well be screwed, but I'll at least hold onto a bit of self-respect.
Very annoying that AI is this new virtue signaling topic. I guess it's a step up from a few years ago when it was about naming branches, but it's annoying.
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.
The actual story below the headline is that AI is allowed in LibreOffice via plugins, they just aren't going to do it themselves since it violates some of their principles about privacy and local data storage.
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.
Regardless of the fact that the 'record download' levels is probably due to some other factor, the world is already becoming conscious that the so-called AI is not all it's cracked up to be.