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.
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.
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.
I'm planning to make a killing when somebody unretires me to fix all the issues.. Or maybe not, I hope my retirement accounts are so large I can laugh at their "piddly $500/hr offer".
The hourly pay will be $1200, no less. Thanks to inflation this amount will cover just about the cost of two second-hand teabags and a mouldy lump of bread.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Conversely, a no-AI ethos is one that will very likely need to be walked back at some point in the future for tech products. AI isn't going anywhere, so finding ways to use it constructively with your product is going to be a far better long term strategy. For now while it's new and scary and there's a lack of regulation and governance and ethical considerations - I can see why an anti-AI stance is popular, but it's not durable long term.
> The criteria we have listed do not amount to a definitive rejection. The AI sector is evolving rapidly; on-premises inference is becoming manageable on standard hardware; and open models are improving much faster than most of us had anticipated. Should an approach emerge that meets all the conditions, we will evaluate it very carefully.
That list seems pretty easy to meet today. I’m not sure why they’re waiting for an approach to emerge instead of building it now, unless there’s something else they haven’t listed.
I'm a big supporter of LibreOffice, Codeberg, SourceHut, etc. on what they do, tell and defend, and I'm with them.
On the other hand, I'm not anti-AI, but I don't want it to be showed down my throat in any and every app I have. I don't want that sparkly "Enhance this slide" button, "WhatsApp AI" in the corner, automatically generated "AI summary" in Google/YouTube, etc.
However, I'm fine with an unobtrusive "Summary" button in my search results (Kagi), or a tab which I can use with some models (Notion), use ML checkbox while resizing or "enhancing" images (Pixelmator Pro).
In short, I want consent, control and dignity in my workflows. Yes, I'm very against how these LLMs are trained, built and how the datacenters they run harm the environment we live in. However, I'm not against the tech. I want responsible development of it, for the customer instead of their owners which wants to milk their users like content and cash cows.
I really appreciate this comment since it very effectively communicates how I feel about the subject, since I have been struggling with putting it into such clear language.
I don't think there's enough information accurately assess this. Anti-AI movements might grow much larger than today, given AIs potential to replace jobs faster than we have the ability to create them. The movement could even result in AI going somewhere.
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.
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.
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.
They have absolutely zero regard for system resources. I understand why, but such things were once considered unfeasible - and very recently were also considered undesirable.
I still use a laptop with a 100 GiB hard drive - only 80 of which are allocated to the /home/ directory. This would cut into the useable space significantly on that machine. How about Chromebooks?
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!
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.
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
I came here to say that this is extraordinarily uninteresting. But some useful thought came out of it: all "AI" features are moving into the generalized agent harness anyways, and good software often maintains a focus. Take Windows, for example. It has a rather broad job being an OS, but as a product it's a good example of loosening focus. it's losing consistency in its opinions about where updates should happen, how settings should apply, which menus are in charge, and even what the design philosophy is. And that bleeds out into the user surface too. Windows 11 is a scattered mess that's increasingly just a surface for finding new ways to pull your attention into ads.
Maybe software just needs to remain straightforward and focused, and we let the ChatGPT and Claude apps handle the AI part of things.
Didn't people find it bundled with a bunch of other things in a single runtime? Downloaded as part of a whole runtime would suggest it wasn't downloaded directly from the source.
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'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.
Or people outside the US distrusting US technology? There is a confluence of trends pointing away from US based tech. It will take a crazy amount of work to restore trust.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
"it's our most powerful X ever" - every Apple event ever
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
From Libre’s announcement (linked in the article):
“This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release!”
Congratulation to your new unix timestamp record! (and yes, you too, nth reader!)
I can tell you wrote this comment when you were younger.
First!
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.
If I can get my mom on Linux... hey now!
Yes, here's the graph of weekly downloads: https://stats.documentfoundation.org/downloads#week,version The 26.8 peak is within the normal range of week-to-week variation.
See also, every new iPhone/Pixel being the best they've ever release. You'd hope so!
What? A Unix timestamp literally cannot ever be lower. Its a completely assinine comparison isn't it?
This is comparative.
False, in January 2038 at least some systems will go back in time
I'm planning to make a killing when somebody unretires me to fix all the issues.. Or maybe not, I hope my retirement accounts are so large I can laugh at their "piddly $500/hr offer".
The hourly pay will be $1200, no less. Thanks to inflation this amount will cover just about the cost of two second-hand teabags and a mouldy lump of bread.
just make sure you get paid in cash before it rolls over.
thats_the_joke.jpg
Just wait til 2037 ;)
I found this graph of LibreOffice downloads https://stats.documentfoundation.org/downloads
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
[delayed]
Conversely, a no-AI ethos is one that will very likely need to be walked back at some point in the future for tech products. AI isn't going anywhere, so finding ways to use it constructively with your product is going to be a far better long term strategy. For now while it's new and scary and there's a lack of regulation and governance and ethical considerations - I can see why an anti-AI stance is popular, but it's not durable long term.
> finding ways to use it constructively with your product is going to be a far better long term strategy
It's worth pointing out that the original Document Foundation blog post (https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/03/yes-no-a...) seems to be doing exactly this:
> The criteria we have listed do not amount to a definitive rejection. The AI sector is evolving rapidly; on-premises inference is becoming manageable on standard hardware; and open models are improving much faster than most of us had anticipated. Should an approach emerge that meets all the conditions, we will evaluate it very carefully.
That list seems pretty easy to meet today. I’m not sure why they’re waiting for an approach to emerge instead of building it now, unless there’s something else they haven’t listed.
What features do you think meet the list right now?
I'm a big supporter of LibreOffice, Codeberg, SourceHut, etc. on what they do, tell and defend, and I'm with them.
On the other hand, I'm not anti-AI, but I don't want it to be showed down my throat in any and every app I have. I don't want that sparkly "Enhance this slide" button, "WhatsApp AI" in the corner, automatically generated "AI summary" in Google/YouTube, etc.
However, I'm fine with an unobtrusive "Summary" button in my search results (Kagi), or a tab which I can use with some models (Notion), use ML checkbox while resizing or "enhancing" images (Pixelmator Pro).
In short, I want consent, control and dignity in my workflows. Yes, I'm very against how these LLMs are trained, built and how the datacenters they run harm the environment we live in. However, I'm not against the tech. I want responsible development of it, for the customer instead of their owners which wants to milk their users like content and cash cows.
I really appreciate this comment since it very effectively communicates how I feel about the subject, since I have been struggling with putting it into such clear language.
I don't think there's enough information accurately assess this. Anti-AI movements might grow much larger than today, given AIs potential to replace jobs faster than we have the ability to create them. The movement could even result in AI going somewhere.
I would love to have codex plugins into libreoffice like m365 office.
The issue with M365 and MSFTs implementation is they did clipping all over again. They force you in the most useless ways.
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.
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.
Could also be due to the fact that every codex install includes a copy of libreoffice
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.
GH copilot installed it for me when trying to read some docs lol
what? why?
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/codex-libreoffice/
To better parse office file formats
They have absolutely zero regard for system resources. I understand why, but such things were once considered unfeasible - and very recently were also considered undesirable.
I still use a laptop with a 100 GiB hard drive - only 80 of which are allocated to the /home/ directory. This would cut into the useable space significantly on that machine. How about Chromebooks?
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!
Been using libreoffice for years.
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.
The only thing I'd need and want from my office suite for AI are for it to stay in sync with a disk file.
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.
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
I came here to say that this is extraordinarily uninteresting. But some useful thought came out of it: all "AI" features are moving into the generalized agent harness anyways, and good software often maintains a focus. Take Windows, for example. It has a rather broad job being an OS, but as a product it's a good example of loosening focus. it's losing consistency in its opinions about where updates should happen, how settings should apply, which menus are in charge, and even what the design philosophy is. And that bleeds out into the user surface too. Windows 11 is a scattered mess that's increasingly just a surface for finding new ways to pull your attention into ads.
Maybe software just needs to remain straightforward and focused, and we let the ChatGPT and Claude apps handle the AI part of things.
Can you control it agentically? If so it’s has all the ai features I would want. I typically don’t care for built in ai features.
This. I don’t want it to have AI features, but often find myself asking some other AI, “how do I change the paper size from A4 to US Letter,” etc.
It’s also been baked into Codex. Go figure
It's open source software - it can be baked into pretty much anything given they follow the license terms.
The question is whether the 10 million active users of Codex / ChatGPT Work count towards the download count.
That would contradict the cause implied in the title here.
Explains the download records as well
Not really. One entity embedding the software into another will only account for at most a handful of downloads.
Unless Codex is vibe coded and it downloads it directly on every installation…
Didn't people find it bundled with a bunch of other things in a single runtime? Downloaded as part of a whole runtime would suggest it wasn't downloaded directly from the source.
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'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.
Anyone tried Numbers? It can't sort a table (only a sheet), and find is scoped to the document (not the sheet).
UNO is for programmatic access. StarOffice ftw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Network_Objects
No AI features is the first feature in years that shipped on time and worked on the first try.
false claim of causality (post hoc, ergo propter hoc).
Why is this website asking me to enable notifications?!?
Are you sure it wasn't Microsoft doing a rug-pull October 13 on offline Office 2021 pro lifetime license installations for MacOS.
A lot of people are not happy about that stunt. =3
Or people outside the US distrusting US technology? There is a confluence of trends pointing away from US based tech. It will take a crazy amount of work to restore trust.
Do nothing and win
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
This is the way!
Related:
Yes, no (built-in) AI is now a feature
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49553350
So related it's in the blog post.
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.
Tell me you haven't used LibreOffice without telling me you haven't used LibreOffice.
It's actually a pretty great software suite.
enough with this anti ai noise resistance is futile it's getting popular due to improved ui
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.
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...
I'm not anti-AI (I have a ChatGPT subscription), I just don't like bloat and nagging.
Enough with this pro-ai noise.
Nonsense. I can (and do) resist a lot of things. Society in general may well be screwed, but I'll at least hold onto a bit of self-respect.
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.
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.