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 think that's a perfectly coherent and reasonable way for both these apps to work.
people don't want AI features leaking into their non-ai apps. I'm not an AI hater - I want my AI app to be able to read and write word docs, but when i decide to open up libreoffice i'm doing that because i want to write something myself, not use AI. i don't need my word processor to bundle an inferior version of what the ChatGPT can do for me.
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.
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.
But that is perfectly consistent with the downloads incrementally going up all the time. It doesn't say anything about whether the recent policy changes increased that rate.
Excuse you? What I originally said was "I don't understand your comment". They posted a clarification, and the clarification still doesn't make sense. No, I haven't read the download numbers. How is that going "well akshually"?
No, it doesn't. If the claim is just that download numbers are not consistently trending upwards, they should have just said that. I would have no trouble understanding that. What they actually said is "Libreoffice didn't say the numbers were going up, they claimed a specific record." Well, so what? Nobody said Libreoffice said that! The OP said that, because if it's true, then it's not surprising that the latest stat (release or not) is the highest ever. Nobody in the thread so far has said anything that contradicts "the numbers were going up anyway, therefore the record might not be to do with the AI policy".
The numbers graph is spiky and I can imagine you could argue either way that they are generally trending up or not. But that's irrelevant!
This objection is completely meaningless unless the download numbers follow a consistent upwards trend. You are simplifying the new record to a boolean, but most people still find meaning in extraordinary events happening, even if they follow a general trend.
So I fail to see this discussion as anything but sophistry until anyone demonstrates that the download numbers are totally ordinary. It's typical HN contrarianism without any value, because it's enough to argue for the possibility of something, even when the data for checking it is easily accessible.
I think the confusion is that robrain somehow understood smokel's objection as being "all-time total downloads obviously increase over time, so this is meaningless", rather than what smokel actually said which was "the number of weekly downloads has simply been increasing over time". Which is why robrain quoted LibreOffice's "This is the highest number of downloads in the first week”, to counter the idea (which nobody suggested) that the record was just about all-time cumulative downloads going up.
That's then what tempfile was questioning how it contradicted smokel's claim (because it doesn't, just an imagined claim). Your points, that if the number of weekly downloads isn't actually consistently increasing then this could still be meaningful, are valid - but irrelevant to tempfile who was wasn't arguing that this is meaningless; you should argue that to smokel instead.
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.
There is a semantic difference between capturing data (recording) and putting somethng on record (capturing/recording an achievement). One is the process of documenting and the other is the documented result that acts as a benchmark.
When you record an achievement, there is no need to record another one until you surpass it. You can record attempts, but they are now just data that makes the actual record more meaningful the longer it exists without being surpassed.
We do consider the oldest person alive and the oldest recorded person ever, to be records of a sort. So if that counts, why wouldn't a personal best count?
It actually happened. The US GNIS system was updated, and thus the apple maps and google maps have updated their maps to reflect
Other map providers will have to make a decision, but these sorts of things have historically been fraught with politics, I think most maps will go with whatever the official source they use has declared
There has to be a much stronger correlation between good press for a software release and the subsequent downloads of it, even if a certain number of downloads were inevitable.
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.
If she's anything like my mom, i.e. someone who has been using computers for a while now but never had the confidence to experiment with it, any small change will freak her out and there really is a long tail of those. It's not a matter of Linux not being good enough, being different is already a real problem.
To continue further down the IT family support software, I use DWService because it seems like it's almost impossible for my sweet friends and relatives to accidentally break it. It's like a cockroach once it's in there and i've been very thankful for that
>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.
But also, you'll notice that giant banner on the linked page. It's because the people "most likely to need it" are also those most likely to fall victim to the increasing number of remote assistance scams.
> In one week, the installer was downloaded more than 1 million times — not counting updates via Linux distribution repositories.
Either there's 1m people downloading new software "because no ai", or there's another popular thing that installs this, and is not counted in the "updates via linux repos". One is much much more probable than the other.
ai has to be one of the most decisive topics on HN. every submission that makes the front page, no matter what the topic is, is guaranteed to have:
- one person accusing the author of using ai, or complaining about ai prose, and a statement along the lines of "stopped reading at..."
- one person saying how ai would make development faster/better/easier, or make the product/thing more successful
if hn is in a bubble of ai, it's two distinct bubbles that fight on every single topic, which isn't really a bubble at that point, is it?
in this thread we run the full range. people wanting ai features, people saying ai is inevitable so libreoffice should embrace it now, people saying they hate ai and how customer's hate ai, etc.
Yeah, the ones that know obvious slop and won't ship it are the ones who will win. Unfortunately it seems like I'm stuck with the other half at my current job.
Disliking clunky autocomplete is very different from going out of your way to replace Word with Libre Office. The average office worker will tolerate ten bad assistants before they voluntarily deal with ODF formatting quirks in a corporate environment
Unless they're is a negative force, such as people being put off by the lack of AI features. While a lack of such a response might not justify the headline used here, I think it is certainly worth noting.
Yes. But in this case as there has been a recent announcement that could be significant, the trend continuing has some significance because it means the announcement likely⁰ had no detrimental effect¹.
We don't know absolutely nothing here: there is a new variable in play and this result gives us some evidence of the effect of that.
--------
[0] It _could_ have done, but something else countered it, though this is less likely according to Occam's razor.
[1] As opposed to reducing interest in the tools. The figures² apparently don't look to support an increase in interest though.
[2] Going by what others here are saying. The linked text doesn't state any numbers, nor does the announcement from the LibreOffice project, and I don't have time to go digging further ATM.
Their point is that weekly downloads may have been on a constant rise for years due to a constant rise in popularity. It's not as constant as absolute number of downloads, but the point is that "breaking record" is still something that's likely happening frequently and doesn't need to be related to any statement they gave. They don't share any numbers, at least in the post.
Something isn't adding up. Here's what the Document Foundation says about 26.8 [1]:
> 1,031,162 downloads
> This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release! These are just stats from our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.
But their weekly stats page [2] does not show anywhere near that many downloads. It shows a small number in the first week, then a bit over 700k next week, then almost a million in the third week. Even if we combine the first two weeks on the chart under the assumption that release weeks might not align with the weeks using in the chart it is nowhere near a million.
Also the mouseover popup on the stats page is showing 26.8 several weeks before release.
Update. Looking at the stats in day view instead of week view, the downloads for their release week were actually around [1] 1.259 million, using 2026-08-26 as the release date. That's the date in the release notes.
However, if we take the release date as 2026-08-25 then the 7 day total is exactly what their blog post said.
Also by comparing the week numbers to the daily numbers, we can determine that their week 35 is August 23-29 (Sunday to Saturday). They are using US week numbering, not ISO week numbering. In ISO it would be 24-30 (Monday to Sunday).
The Document Foundation is based in Germany so I kind of expected they would use ISO weeks.
[1] "around" rather than the exact number because this originally was an update to the original comment, but the edit window closed while I was writing it. When you submit in those circumstances you don't get an error and your editing area is undisturbed. You simply lose the editing area. I'm not going to go and add up everything again, so am going from memory of the number.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's true of any feature you don't use. And while it's nothing new for people to get upset about work being put into features they don't care about, I've never seen anything like this level of vitriol. In particular I never saw anyone say they won't use a piece of software at all if it contains a particular optional feature, until LLMs came along.
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.
> 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.
Experience has shown that bad prose, grammar and orthograph has been accepted in business setting for the last 3 decades, basically since people stopped writing cards/letters and started communicating with sms and later instant messaging apps. Writing skills globally went downhill. The thing is: virtually nobody cares anymore.
What I see is rather management forcing employees to use AI, menacing them of bad yearly review if metric show they don't use them.
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.
How can you be so disconnected from reality? The valuations are based on the immense value of LLMs, which exists regardless of how consumers - who are very much not where the revenue is coming from - feel about it.
I can see how much we are spending on Claude and codex at meta. Believe me, the AI company valuations are not coming from Microsoft word ai assistant.
What immense value? Has it solved world hunger? Has it provided abundant clean energy that no one needs to worry about it? Has it taken care of people's basic needs so that they can be free of work and focus on what's rewarding for them?
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.
That's why for productivity software I vastly prefer open source. Sure it can be janky sometimes but at least I don't feel like I'm being fleeced and sold to the highest bidder.
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.
So you recognize that your users will dislike these features. And your solution is to try to hide it, rather than removing the features you know your users won't like? You do you, but that doesn't seem like good product design to me.
im using it for mundane text processing. categorizing and merging recipe ingredients for shopping lists. the users like the feature, unless i tell them its AI. i dont feel any ethical need to disclose that. its just software
So if I was black and racists were using my app that would stop if I put that prominently in the app, i should feel ethically compelled to disclose that?
That's a blanket statement. People like AI when it's actually useful, like photo editing tools that can remove unwanted objects from the background. Or how in iOS 27 they added AI to the Shortcuts app so you can describe a shortcut and it'll build it for you. It's turned the app into something I practically never used to something that's actually got me automating repetitive tasks on my phone.
The issue is the past few years of AI being shoved into everything with no taste being applied because it impresses shareholders. If you implement it in a way where it's actually useful, people will like it.
For enterprise software it's a feature. For most consumer software it's an anti-feature. Each of these crowds are on opposite ends of the same axis: the executive class coalesces around the belief that LLMs bring automation benefits that will positively affect the org's bottom line. The populist belief is that LLMs and generative models are at best annoying and at worst anti-human.
At the risk of sounding trite there is a kernel of truth to both of these camps and things will eventually shake out. As LLM capabilities plateau and people broadly realize that they excel in domains that don't require discretion or taste the market will settle someplace in the middle.
I'm flexing my PM muscles by working on small personal projects and am constantly asking myself 1) what problem is what I'm building solving, 2) which parts of solving this problem are largely janitorial/annoying, then 3) could an LLM be leveraged (not used, leveraged) to reduce struggle. My golf app and fitness tracker telling me "lol u 3-putted too many holes" or "bro yr sleep is cooked" do not fall into this category. Feeding an apartment lease into Claude and having it enumerate the ways that my landlord is trying to push the boundaries of tenant law does.
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!
Normalize into flat xml that I could then parse in Nokogiri.
Edit for clarity: I am a Rubyist at heart so I reach for Ruby for almost all of my automation, ML, and even now AI stuff. Fro a very long time, I have been able to use CLI LibreOffice to do amazing things. It can read everything, even obscure formats by today's standards, going back into the 1990s. And then once in OpenOffice XML you have one target to parse in your scripting language of choice to do document analysis, data loss prevention detection, and more. All with a clean open source license with no server usage restrictions, unlike MS Office.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Not sure what is "bold" about that claim, soffice is used in a ton of "document generation skills" and as soon as those tools start making into people's CI pipelines there will inevitably be spikes in download activity.
Tbh I wonder if it's related to AI at all, or just a consequence of Microsoft being institutionally unable to ship working software anymore and people are finally tired of spending so much money for such garbage products.
Buddy of mine tried to use some Exchange tools to troubleshoot a mail flow issue this morning. Puts in his query parameters (start/end date, and a user's email address). 1774 results, and the table below that shows "No data available." It'd be fucking comical if his company wasn't spending tens of thousands per month on their 365 infrastructure that's seemingly broken in new and exciting ways every. single. fucking. day.
Standard Linux software is often obtained through package management. Is LibreOffice self-updating? Is an update counted as a "download"? What about the torrents, Snap, Microsoft Store...?
I'd hardly consider fluctuations between 2.2 million and 3.3 million dowloads "flat".
Also, the metric used in the article was "downloads in the first week after a new release", which apparently broke a record. Regardless of the reason behind that record breaking number, switching to monthly dowloads to see if there is a sudden surge in popularity seems like the wrong metric.
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[ 0.36 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49528079
people don't want AI features leaking into their non-ai apps. I'm not an AI hater - I want my AI app to be able to read and write word docs, but when i decide to open up libreoffice i'm doing that because i want to write something myself, not use AI. i don't need my word processor to bundle an inferior version of what the ChatGPT can do for me.
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.
Unix timestamp counter breaks record after writing this comment.
“This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release!”
They're not just saying the absolute downloads are going up, as the OP suggests.
The absolute number of lifetime downloads can of course only go up (but that's even more vacuous).
The numbers graph is spiky and I can imagine you could argue either way that they are generally trending up or not. But that's irrelevant!
So I fail to see this discussion as anything but sophistry until anyone demonstrates that the download numbers are totally ordinary. It's typical HN contrarianism without any value, because it's enough to argue for the possibility of something, even when the data for checking it is easily accessible.
That's then what tempfile was questioning how it contradicted smokel's claim (because it doesn't, just an imagined claim). Your points, that if the number of weekly downloads isn't actually consistently increasing then this could still be meaningful, are valid - but irrelevant to tempfile who was wasn't arguing that this is meaningless; you should argue that to smokel instead.
When you record an achievement, there is no need to record another one until you surpass it. You can record attempts, but they are now just data that makes the actual record more meaningful the longer it exists without being surpassed.
I certainly celebrate mine every time.
Both Google Maps and Apple Maps changed it for users in the United States.
MapQuest public refused, causing literally dozens of people to ask, "MapQuest is still a thing?"
Other map providers will have to make a decision, but these sorts of things have historically been fraught with politics, I think most maps will go with whatever the official source they use has declared
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.
https://rustdesk.com/
But also, you'll notice that giant banner on the linked page. It's because the people "most likely to need it" are also those most likely to fall victim to the increasing number of remote assistance scams.
Either there's 1m people downloading new software "because no ai", or there's another popular thing that installs this, and is not counted in the "updates via linux repos". One is much much more probable than the other.
Yeah, an AI tool:
The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49527396
ai has to be one of the most decisive topics on HN. every submission that makes the front page, no matter what the topic is, is guaranteed to have:
- one person accusing the author of using ai, or complaining about ai prose, and a statement along the lines of "stopped reading at..."
- one person saying how ai would make development faster/better/easier, or make the product/thing more successful
if hn is in a bubble of ai, it's two distinct bubbles that fight on every single topic, which isn't really a bubble at that point, is it?
in this thread we run the full range. people wanting ai features, people saying ai is inevitable so libreoffice should embrace it now, people saying they hate ai and how customer's hate ai, etc.
We don't know absolutely nothing here: there is a new variable in play and this result gives us some evidence of the effect of that.
--------
[0] It _could_ have done, but something else countered it, though this is less likely according to Occam's razor.
[1] As opposed to reducing interest in the tools. The figures² apparently don't look to support an increase in interest though.
[2] Going by what others here are saying. The linked text doesn't state any numbers, nor does the announcement from the LibreOffice project, and I don't have time to go digging further ATM.
The ChatGPT app downloads a copy of LibreOffice when you ask it to make pptx files.
So I've downloaded LibreOffice 3 times this week without really paying attention to it.
It is the first to break a million in a week. Even if it has been steadily going up most people would consider passing that number interesting.
> 1,031,162 downloads
> This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release! These are just stats from our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.
But their weekly stats page [2] does not show anywhere near that many downloads. It shows a small number in the first week, then a bit over 700k next week, then almost a million in the third week. Even if we combine the first two weeks on the chart under the assumption that release weeks might not align with the weeks using in the chart it is nowhere near a million.
Also the mouseover popup on the stats page is showing 26.8 several weeks before release.
[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/02/one-week...
[2] https://stats.documentfoundation.org/downloads#week,version
However, if we take the release date as 2026-08-25 then the 7 day total is exactly what their blog post said.
Also by comparing the week numbers to the daily numbers, we can determine that their week 35 is August 23-29 (Sunday to Saturday). They are using US week numbering, not ISO week numbering. In ISO it would be 24-30 (Monday to Sunday).
The Document Foundation is based in Germany so I kind of expected they would use ISO weeks.
[1] "around" rather than the exact number because this originally was an update to the original comment, but the edit window closed while I was writing it. When you submit in those circumstances you don't get an error and your editing area is undisturbed. You simply lose the editing area. I'm not going to go and add up everything again, so am going from memory of the number.
Like how Hollywood is constantly saying each week's ticket sales are record-breaking, because they don't factor for inflation or population growth.
Yes, no (built-in) AI is now a feature
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49553350
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...
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.
What I see is rather management forcing employees to use AI, menacing them of bad yearly review if metric show they don't use them.
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.
I can see how much we are spending on Claude and codex at meta. Believe me, the AI company valuations are not coming from Microsoft word ai assistant.
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 is the past few years of AI being shoved into everything with no taste being applied because it impresses shareholders. If you implement it in a way where it's actually useful, people will like it.
[1]: https://keenwrite.com/
At the risk of sounding trite there is a kernel of truth to both of these camps and things will eventually shake out. As LLM capabilities plateau and people broadly realize that they excel in domains that don't require discretion or taste the market will settle someplace in the middle.
I'm flexing my PM muscles by working on small personal projects and am constantly asking myself 1) what problem is what I'm building solving, 2) which parts of solving this problem are largely janitorial/annoying, then 3) could an LLM be leveraged (not used, leveraged) to reduce struggle. My golf app and fitness tracker telling me "lol u 3-putted too many holes" or "bro yr sleep is cooked" do not fall into this category. Feeding an apartment lease into Claude and having it enumerate the ways that my landlord is trying to push the boundaries of tenant law does.
A lot of people are not happy about that stunt. =3
What do you mean here? Normalizing it into ODF format? Does that limit which tools/libraries you can use to analyze it?
Edit for clarity: I am a Rubyist at heart so I reach for Ruby for almost all of my automation, ML, and even now AI stuff. Fro a very long time, I have been able to use CLI LibreOffice to do amazing things. It can read everything, even obscure formats by today's standards, going back into the 1990s. And then once in OpenOffice XML you have one target to parse in your scripting language of choice to do document analysis, data loss prevention detection, and more. All with a clean open source license with no server usage restrictions, unlike MS Office.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Network_Objects
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/docx/S...
Buddy of mine tried to use some Exchange tools to troubleshoot a mail flow issue this morning. Puts in his query parameters (start/end date, and a user's email address). 1774 results, and the table below that shows "No data available." It'd be fucking comical if his company wasn't spending tens of thousands per month on their 365 infrastructure that's seemingly broken in new and exciting ways every. single. fucking. day.
Codex bundles it with the desktop app as well for the same purpose.
Standard Linux software is often obtained through package management. Is LibreOffice self-updating? Is an update counted as a "download"? What about the torrents, Snap, Microsoft Store...?
https://www.libreoffice.org/download-other/
I'd hardly consider fluctuations between 2.2 million and 3.3 million dowloads "flat".
Also, the metric used in the article was "downloads in the first week after a new release", which apparently broke a record. Regardless of the reason behind that record breaking number, switching to monthly dowloads to see if there is a sudden surge in popularity seems like the wrong metric.
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.