Interest in LibreOffice, the open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, is on the rise, with weekly downloads of its software package close to 1 million a week. That’s the highest download number since 2023.
“We estimate around 200 million [LibreOffice] users, but it’s important to note that we respect users’ privacy and don’t track them, so we can’t say for sure,” said Mike Saunders, an open-source advocate and a deputy to the board of directors at The Document Foundation.
LibreOffice users typically want a straightforward interface, Saunders said. “They don’t want subscriptions, and they don’t want AI being ‘helpful’ by poking its nose into their work — it reminds them of Clippy from the bad old days,” he said.
There are genuine use cases for generative AI tools, but many users prefer to opt-in to it and choose when and where to enable it. “We have zero plans to put AI into LibreOffice. But we understand the value of some AI tools and are encouraging developers to create … extensions that use AI in a responsible way,” Saunders said.
No matter who you ask, it still seems like everyone fucking hates it. I never heard a single good word about teams and still its one of the most widely used conference softwares.
We have to do all of our calls on Teams because we work with participants and it’s a bit more secure than Zoom (which can have people straight up bombing your call for funsies). And if we’re already using it for that, idea is we may as well use it as a shared drive too. An ugly and buggy one.
It’s absolutely terrible. I’m looking at it now and just glancing at the screen I can come up with problems. All your recent chance are down the left hand side in chronological order with absolutely no way for you to organize or label them, It frequently just doesn’t work and you have to use the online version which has a different UI for zero reason at all, that is no configurable options for muting. It’s either on or off. Even WhatsApp has options to mute for 30 minutes.
That’s just the surface stuff. There’s a bunch of little annoying UI issues as well that only become really apparent when you use it for a while. So they definitely didn’t QA any of it.