LibreOffice 400M Downloads, and Counting | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice 400M Downloads, and Counting

blog.documentfoundation.org

203 pointsmariuz77 comments

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

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.

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

I'm sure you're right. Has not been an issue for us at all though. Probably because we are not really dealing with documents very much.

Depends when you got used to office probably. To me Libreoffice looks more like office than office does nowadays.

To me, Abiword was the best clone of the best version of Word. To bad it is more or less abandonware.

That reminds me of switching to sublime's parser wrt a huge MySQL file, that was a while back though 2019 I think

Yeah, it looks more like post-2007 Office with the Ribbon; LibreOffice, like its predecessors, looks more like classical Office 95/97.

Are these concerns valid?: https://forum.cryptpad.org/d/232-onlyoffice-concerns-vendor-...

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.

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.

@jospoortvliet did a comparison of the two projects that's very much worth a read.

https://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2020/06/collabora-vs-onlyoffi...

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.

Growing up on windows 98 and xp I still don't understand what people like about modern looking apps

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.

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.

Like most open source projects unfortunately.

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?

No online access required.

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.

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.

I think the interesting advantage is that you should be able to host it.

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.

New product with fewer features and less compatibility vs old product which is mature and has a full bug tracker

It's anecdotal, but I have a similar feeling about OnlyOffice. It has better compatibility with Word than LibreOffice and has an easier-to-use, modern interface resembling Word 2010/2013.

After switching to OnlyOffice I never looked back.

Does OnlyOffice still not support RTL languages?

I believe they finally added it in an update last year

The github page lists programming languages that include shell, php, and typescript. Blah! - it's an amalgamation of stuff, not a coherent piece of software. And the official website offers commercial stuff. Nowhere do I see a license, so I'm assuming it's quite far from GPL.

When you learn to make decisions on principles, LibreOffice will be the obvious choice.

When you learn to read properly, you'll see that the AGPL 3 license is prominently displayed on all of their repos, and those languages are only listed because they have SDK's for each of them. The core repo is clearly written in C++.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/

Their Android app is also the best open source alternative I've found thus far.

> Part of the source code are located in private repositories. You can't compile the project without them.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/documents-app-android/issues/3...

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.

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/

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!

Thanks! If you try it and have any feedback please let me know :)

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.

I just use the flatpak version, it's always the latest version, or very close to the latest.

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.

That would make sense, since that would ridiculously inflate those numbers. I bet I've installed Open/LibreOffice a couple of dozen times inadvertently.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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" :-)

FYI, The Document Foundation has [a recent blog post](https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/01/16/localwri...) highlighting a generative AI extension intended for LibreOffice.

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.

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.

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...

I like to use pdf24 for this sort of thing. Fast and simple.

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.

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.

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.

LibreOffice Draw is the best free PDF editor, akin to the flexibility of Illustrator but actually easier to use for documents with multiple pages.

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.

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.

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

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

Come on, Apache, admit what we all know to be true, and figure out a way to gently wind the OpenOffice project down.

Apache is generally a collection of over-engineered abandonware.

About to start work this morning but I could come up with a list of hundreds of Apache projects in use worldwide across tens of thousands of products in hundreds of thousands of companies.

If someone wants to look into this, here are their projects: https://apache.org/index.html#projects-list

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

There is plain LibreOffice Online, but it is apparently frozen at the moment: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

I used both, LibreOffice calc for heavier data analysis than Google Sheets can handle. Google can also read LibreOffice's file formats easily.

Check out the onlyoffice links above for a remote floss alternative.

> 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?

I think this is in reference to OpenOffice but the wording is rather confusing.

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

Related: It's Time To Let Go, Apache Software Foundation

https://rocket9labs.com/post/its-time-to-let-go-apache-softw...

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

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.

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

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

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