LibreOffice 400M Downloads, and Counting
74 comments
·January 30, 2025dizhn
RamRodification
For non tech savvy people at my workplace we go for OnlyOffice because it looks more familiar when coming from Microsoft Office. However, sooner or later they try to open a very big spreadsheet and it just chokes completely. When that happens we switch them over to LibreOffice which usually handles it without issue.
maxloh
OnlyOffice has better compatibility with Microsoft Office formats in most cases.
LibreOffice has been developed with Open Document Format as its first-class citizen. In my experience, it can't render the layout correctly for most docx forms created with tables.
For example, this is a form I filled a few months ago for my college's paperwork: https://imgur.com/tv5GDZa
shiandow
Depends when you got used to office probably. To me Libreoffice looks more like office than office does nowadays.
queuebert
To me, Abiword was the best clone of the best version of Word. To bad it is more or less abandonware.
ge96
That reminds me of switching to sublime's parser wrt a huge MySQL file, that was a while back though 2019 I think
bananaflag
Yeah, it looks more like post-2007 Office with the Ribbon; LibreOffice, like its predecessors, looks more like classical Office 95/97.
belter
Are these concerns valid?: https://forum.cryptpad.org/d/232-onlyoffice-concerns-vendor-...
nopcode
I believe it's understood that OnlyOffice devs are (mostly) Russian. And that in todays world Russian software companies have to go through hoops to be able to send/receive invoices/contracts/etc.
Some parts of their portfolio are not FOSS, these are the components in the commercial edition (the hosted/embeddable version of onlyoffice).
I have customers running OnlyOffice and we've never seen anything suspicious in our security tooling.
So I believe it comes down to your opinion/mindset around the whole Russia thing.
Tajnymag
Recently, I have also switched to OnlyOffice due to their document compatibility and nicer UI. However, on my machines, it's actually generally slower than LibreOffice. The UI is nicer, but it feels sluggish. Similarly to how Vivaldi feels less responsive than other Chromium forks.
kwanbix
I've tried to like LibreOffice for years, but man, it's just so ugly. And no, I’m not asking for a ribbon interface (I think that's awful too), but the UI looks like it’s stuck in the past.
Gigachad
Most FOSS projects are basically incapable of updating their UI since the user base tends to be a collection of people most resistant to any change.
You’d almost be better starting a project from scratch than trying to fix libreoffice.
lousken
Growing up on windows 98 and xp I still don't understand what people like about modern looking apps
system7rocks
Yes, 400M downloads are like 400M acceptances of mediocrity and awful design. It’s always been so slow too in my opinion.
You can improve a Linux distro by simply not including LibreOffice.
Sigh.
t0bia_s
Like most open source projects unfortunately.
hex-m
@jospoortvliet did a comparison of the two projects that's very much worth a read.
https://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2020/06/collabora-vs-onlyoffi...
bovermyer
OnlyOffice seems very online-centric, but has desktop apps available. Are those desktop apps offline-capable, or do they require some online component to function?
operator-name
No online access required.
fiskfiskfisk
I'm not sure if having a broken navigation menu at the top because of Disconnect or uBlock is a good sign, but their product seems like a decent alternative.
lnauta
I've been using it for about a year now and for personal stuff its fine. Just some sheets and the occasional document and there haven't been any issues with formatting and such that tend to pop up when moving between MS and others. It runs with a single window too, where all docs and sheets are open, I like that.
rbanffy
I think the interesting advantage is that you should be able to host it.
liontwist
New product with fewer features and less compatibility vs old product which is mature and has a full bug tracker
t43562
This sounds like it doesn't count the use of libreoffice in Linux distros. I never download it for example. I suppose that 400mil downloads is probably from Windows and Mac users.
I used to consider it very heavy but my daughter's Raspberry pi runs it fine.
I use the Draw component the most. It is great for drawing boxes with text connected by arrows which is what my main use case is. Miro is better because it scales text when you scale a box and if Draw could do this I'd be in heaven.
tpoacher
I'm on linux but I also download from the website to get the latest updates; the distro repo versions are typically quite outdated.
In theory, the downloadable version lets you know when there's an update. In practice I'm using a little script [0] which I've integrated in my update manager to manage update-notifications for me.
lousken
I use libreoffice just like regular old office, once every few years I get a major update when I update my distro, it's fine too.
t43562
I love the idea - there are a lot of things I want to watch for updates that I build or install myself from a download!
hahn-kev
Draw is great, I use it to edit PDFs, though it doesn't always handle that very well, it's really nice when I need to do some simple stuff.
bdcravens
That would make sense, since that would ridiculously inflate those numbers. I bet I've installed Open/LibreOffice a couple of dozen times inadvertently.
dtm987654123
it also excludes downloads Windows/Mac OS app stores though I don't know what percentage of Windows/Mac users would download it that way
ozim
Happy user for all personal stuff business stuff is all MSFT as I am just an employee. From time to time I donated some EUR, that is one of the projects that I think is essential as everyone needs to have a spreadsheet that they can edit locally and not share with some cloud monsters.
NoboruWataya
Same, I am trapped in the MSFT ecosystem at work but for personal stuff LO is more than sufficient. Granted .doc(x) files don't always look perfect when I open them, but good enough for my limited needs.
IMO a local word processor is one of the fundamental pieces of a desktop experience so LO plays an important role. It's also not easy and sometimes thankless. In that way I view them somewhat similarly to Mozilla.
AtlasBarfed
I'm really hoping LLMs will help LO close functionality gaps with Microsoft. Let's face it there is a lot of not exciting code and testing in office formats.
It's the type of thing it should excel at (pun half intended) to close the file format drift/obfuscation.
I haven't seen much discussion of LLMs as decompilers. That would seem like something they could do quite well to at least help close the file format obfuscation war.
sega_sai
LibreOffice is such a great tool. I almost exclusively used it (LO Impress) for science presentations and lectures for more than 20 years (previously as Openoffice). It has its issues, with things like videos, or really big presentations, or formatting changes between platforms, but most of the time it did the job. The fact that you can embed LaTeX in slides (through an extension) is a great thing. I don't think the end result ever looked as slick as alternatives, but if that is not your ultimate goal, it's fine.
openrisk
> Then the upswing, when even the most fashionable users realised that desktop office suites would never die and would coexist with the cloud.
Libreoffice in combination with local ML/AI owns the future. Whats missing is to orchestrate an API for the vast and growing open source data science ecosystem to be more readily available to non-technical end-users.
When that happens it will be another "Sputnik moment" :-)
e1g
LibreOffice also can be used headlesslsy to convert other files to PDF locally. We use it via a container to first generate well-styled docx files (letters, invoices etc) and then convert those to PDFs.
pzmarzly
Same. Do you know some public and maintained (kept up to date) docker container for that usecase? I tried using https://github.com/vladholubiev/docker-libreoffice-pdf-cli and while it was exactly what I wanted, it hasn't been updated in ages, and its ancient version of LibreOffice rendered my docx docs wrongly. So I ended building my one-off updated version, but didn't publish it as I wouldn't want to be keeping it up to date as well.
e1g
I don't know of any actively maintained, but here's a drop-in replacement for you that does the same thing with the latest LibreOffice
https://gist.github.com/eugene1g/74172a761e604d875a59774189a...
ANighRaisin
I like to use pdf24 for this sort of thing. Fast and simple.
jquinby
I used it exclusively for my graduate theology studies - all my papers, presentations, and so on. Along with Zotero, I had everything I needed.
Just for fun, I did a few papers in LaTex, but I ran into a minor footnote formatting issue that I couldn't fix, so I didn't use it for my closure projects. LibreOffice was fine.
MassPikeMike
The only nontrivial thing I use a word processor for is "mail merge" with a spreadsheet to create mailing labels. I used to have to keep a Windows VM around to do that in Microsoft Office. But a couple of years ago, I tried LibreOffice and was happy to find it has progressed so much. Now it's easier to use LibreOffice for that task than to use the Microsoft tools. Kudos to the developers for their careful work getting stuff like that right.
nelblu
So happy that it continues to grow in popularity. Draw is probably their best tool in the suite. Also related, people might be interested in using Xournal (https://xournalpp.github.io/) for PDF manipulations and pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) for general document conversion.
sandbx
LibreOffice Draw is the best free PDF editor, akin to the flexibility of Illustrator but actually easier to use for documents with multiple pages.
tslocum
Related: It's Time To Let Go, Apache Software Foundation
https://rocket9labs.com/post/its-time-to-let-go-apache-softw...
system7rocks
LibreOffice is like X - it needs to be mothballed and a new paradigm needs to be brought into being.
The preferences and toolbars are simply a confusing, amateur hour disaster of no clear design vision, just people cramming their weird and obscure use cases in. Blessings to those who get use out of it, but there is hardly a more disappointing example of open source then this.
pixxel
Ooo you got an unnecessary swipe at X in. Look at you!
In true hackernews fashion I'll mention their competitor as my personal preference. Their editors are IMO much faster and slicker. I have very light document needs and this other open source software suite serves me very well. Although I appreciate libreoffice, I never did like using it.
https://www.onlyoffice.com/
https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE