6 ms·

LibreOffice 400M Downloads, and Counting

203 points by mariuz 2y ago

ozim 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
mavhc 2y ago
Now it has working auto update they should get loads more downloads
dizhn 2y ago
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://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE
- fiskfiskfisk 2y ago
  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.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    I think the interesting advantage is that you should be able to host it.
  - lnauta 2y ago
    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.
- Tajnymag 2y ago
  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.
- mrbluecoat 2y ago
  I sincerely congratulate the hard work of any open source office alternative and the small army of developers and contributors that make it possible. That said, I too agree the OnlyOffice UI/UX is light years ahead of the competition when compared to commercially successful options like Microsoft Office.
- RamRodification 2y ago
  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.
openrisk 2y ago
> 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" :-)
- MRPockets 2y ago
  FYI, The Document Foundation has [a recent blog post](https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/01/16/localwriter-a-libreoffice-writer-extension-for-local-generative-ai/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/01/16/localwri...) highlighting a generative AI extension intended for LibreOffice.
jhoechtl 2y ago
For those wondering what happened in 2019: > In 2019, a series of attacks on the download counter – no data is collected other than the click on the DOWNLOAD button – led to a barely credible increase
t43562 2y ago
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.
- dtm987654123 2y ago
  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
- tpoacher 2y ago
  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. [0] https://sr.ht/~tpapastylianou/misc-updater/ https://sr.ht/~tpapastylianou/misc-updater/
  - t43562 2y ago
    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!
    - tpoacher 2y ago
      Thanks! If you try it and have any feedback please let me know :)
  - lousken 2y ago
    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.
caboteria 2y ago
No discussion of LibreOffice would be complete without a reminder that the Apache Foundation continues to harm the open source community by pretending that Apache OpenOffice isn't dead as a doornail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice Come on, Apache, admit what we all know to be true, and figure out a way to gently wind the OpenOffice project down.
- topspin 2y ago
  I just happened to use Calc for the first time in a looong while yesterday. Pretty nice. Fast, conventional, no damn ribbon menus. Saved to office365 format for consumption by others and it was all flawless. It's always been functional, but what I saw yesterday felt pretty polished. Used whatever version is default with Ubuntu 24.04. So, it's still being actively refined. I think you're maybe a bit too hard on LibreOffice and Apache. Also, I'll mention something about Thunderbird. Because Snaps, I installed Thunderbird from the official site. I am amazed by this software. Thunderbird is legitimately a nice desktop email client. What amazing progress. I wondered about updates for Thunderbird, thinking that since I'd done an out-of-band install, I wouldn't get updates. I was astonished to find it's been silently auto-updating itself with zero drama. Kudos.
  - i80and 2y ago
    Ubuntu includes LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. This is the key point of confusion! LibreOffice is great, and is the actively developed piece of software for decades now. OpenOffice is just an old zombie propped up by Apache with no actual work beyond the most trivial maintenance and no purpose beyond confusing people. No Linux distro includes it.
    - topspin 2y ago
      I see. I corrected that part before reading your response. Good to understand the actual situation. Yes, I agree. There is no point to OpenOffice any longer.
- ahoka 2y ago
mycall 2y ago
Note the user count is much lower but unknown too since it is bundled with many distros.
- sphars 2y ago
  This is also my take. I've installed many distros and nearly all of the (consumer) distros have LibreOffice installed by default. I have never explicitly downloaded it myself, and I've even uninstalled it a few times.
e1g 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 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 2y ago
    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/74172a761e604d875a59774189aafb68 https://gist.github.com/eugene1g/74172a761e604d875a59774189a...
- ANighRaisin 2y ago
  I like to use pdf24 for this sort of thing. Fast and simple.
sega_sai 2y ago
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.
nelblu 2y ago
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/ https://xournalpp.github.io/) for PDF manipulations and pandoc (https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/) for general document conversion.
jmclnx 2y ago
I was hoping for an big uptick in downloads due to Microsoft Office "crazyness". But seems to be a slow uptrend. Which is still good.
boramalper 2y ago
> First, rapid growth between 2011 and 2014 to 30 million downloads, despite the fierce hostility of the project created to kill LibreOffice. Out of curiosity, what's the "fierce hostility" they're talking about?
- codemusings 2y ago
  I think this is in reference to OpenOffice but the wording is rather confusing.
MassPikeMike 2y ago
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.
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jquinby 2y ago
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.
phito 2y ago
I opened LibreOffice Calc by mistake so many times, when trying to open the calculator
Lambdanaut 2y ago
Does anyone have any advice for someone that is curious about moving from Google to LibreOffice? I work in a collaborative environment where everyone immediately having access to the same data on different environments (including mobile) is desirable.
- sandbx 2y ago
  I used both, LibreOffice calc for heavier data analysis than Google Sheets can handle. Google can also read LibreOffice's file formats easily.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Check out the onlyoffice links above for a remote floss alternative.
- trelane 2y ago
  Collabora Online may be what you are looking for. It's commercial, but it is LibreOffice (Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice). https://www.collaboraonline.com/writer/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/writer/ There is plain LibreOffice Online, but it is apparently frozen at the moment: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
system7rocks 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Ooo you got an unnecessary swipe at X in. Look at you!
sandbx 2y ago
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 2y ago
Related: It's Time To Let Go, Apache Software Foundation https://rocket9labs.com/post/its-time-to-let-go-apache-software-foundation/ https://rocket9labs.com/post/its-time-to-let-go-apache-softw...
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203 points by mariuz 2y ago

ozim 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.

mavhc 2y ago

Now it has working auto update they should get loads more downloads

dizhn 2y ago

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://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE

fiskfiskfisk 2y ago
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.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  I think the interesting advantage is that you should be able to host it.
- lnauta 2y ago
  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.
Tajnymag 2y ago
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.
mrbluecoat 2y ago
I sincerely congratulate the hard work of any open source office alternative and the small army of developers and contributors that make it possible. That said, I too agree the OnlyOffice UI/UX is light years ahead of the competition when compared to commercially successful options like Microsoft Office.
RamRodification 2y ago
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.

openrisk 2y ago

> 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" :-)

MRPockets 2y ago
FYI, The Document Foundation has [a recent blog post](https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/01/16/localwriter-a-libreoffice-writer-extension-for-local-generative-ai/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/01/16/localwri...) highlighting a generative AI extension intended for LibreOffice.

jhoechtl 2y ago

For those wondering what happened in 2019: > In 2019, a series of attacks on the download counter – no data is collected other than the click on the DOWNLOAD button – led to a barely credible increase

t43562 2y ago

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.

dtm987654123 2y ago
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
tpoacher 2y ago
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. [0] https://sr.ht/~tpapastylianou/misc-updater/ https://sr.ht/~tpapastylianou/misc-updater/
- t43562 2y ago
  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!
  - tpoacher 2y ago
    Thanks! If you try it and have any feedback please let me know :)
- lousken 2y ago
  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.

caboteria 2y ago

No discussion of LibreOffice would be complete without a reminder that the Apache Foundation continues to harm the open source community by pretending that Apache OpenOffice isn't dead as a doornail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice Come on, Apache, admit what we all know to be true, and figure out a way to gently wind the OpenOffice project down.

topspin 2y ago
I just happened to use Calc for the first time in a looong while yesterday. Pretty nice. Fast, conventional, no damn ribbon menus. Saved to office365 format for consumption by others and it was all flawless. It's always been functional, but what I saw yesterday felt pretty polished. Used whatever version is default with Ubuntu 24.04. So, it's still being actively refined. I think you're maybe a bit too hard on LibreOffice and Apache. Also, I'll mention something about Thunderbird. Because Snaps, I installed Thunderbird from the official site. I am amazed by this software. Thunderbird is legitimately a nice desktop email client. What amazing progress. I wondered about updates for Thunderbird, thinking that since I'd done an out-of-band install, I wouldn't get updates. I was astonished to find it's been silently auto-updating itself with zero drama. Kudos.
- i80and 2y ago
  Ubuntu includes LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. This is the key point of confusion! LibreOffice is great, and is the actively developed piece of software for decades now. OpenOffice is just an old zombie propped up by Apache with no actual work beyond the most trivial maintenance and no purpose beyond confusing people. No Linux distro includes it.
  - topspin 2y ago
    I see. I corrected that part before reading your response. Good to understand the actual situation. Yes, I agree. There is no point to OpenOffice any longer.
ahoka 2y ago

mycall 2y ago

Note the user count is much lower but unknown too since it is bundled with many distros.

sphars 2y ago
This is also my take. I've installed many distros and nearly all of the (consumer) distros have LibreOffice installed by default. I have never explicitly downloaded it myself, and I've even uninstalled it a few times.

e1g 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
  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/74172a761e604d875a59774189aafb68 https://gist.github.com/eugene1g/74172a761e604d875a59774189a...
ANighRaisin 2y ago
I like to use pdf24 for this sort of thing. Fast and simple.

sega_sai 2y ago

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.

nelblu 2y ago

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/ https://xournalpp.github.io/) for PDF manipulations and pandoc (https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/) for general document conversion.

jmclnx 2y ago

I was hoping for an big uptick in downloads due to Microsoft Office "crazyness". But seems to be a slow uptrend. Which is still good.

boramalper 2y ago

> First, rapid growth between 2011 and 2014 to 30 million downloads, despite the fierce hostility of the project created to kill LibreOffice. Out of curiosity, what's the "fierce hostility" they're talking about?

codemusings 2y ago
I think this is in reference to OpenOffice but the wording is rather confusing.

MassPikeMike 2y ago

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.

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jquinby 2y ago

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.

phito 2y ago

I opened LibreOffice Calc by mistake so many times, when trying to open the calculator

Lambdanaut 2y ago

Does anyone have any advice for someone that is curious about moving from Google to LibreOffice? I work in a collaborative environment where everyone immediately having access to the same data on different environments (including mobile) is desirable.

sandbx 2y ago
I used both, LibreOffice calc for heavier data analysis than Google Sheets can handle. Google can also read LibreOffice's file formats easily.
mixmastamyk 2y ago
Check out the onlyoffice links above for a remote floss alternative.
trelane 2y ago
Collabora Online may be what you are looking for. It's commercial, but it is LibreOffice (Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice). https://www.collaboraonline.com/writer/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/writer/ There is plain LibreOffice Online, but it is apparently frozen at the moment: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

system7rocks 2y ago

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 2y ago
Ooo you got an unnecessary swipe at X in. Look at you!

sandbx 2y ago

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 2y ago

Related: It's Time To Let Go, Apache Software Foundation https://rocket9labs.com/post/its-time-to-let-go-apache-software-foundation/ https://rocket9labs.com/post/its-time-to-let-go-apache-softw...

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