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I’m afraid to find out how many people are still downloading OpenOffice, thinking it’s the same software they heard about back in 2010.
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Submitted 2 months ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Peffse@lemmy.world 2 months ago
digger@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Is it not the same software they heard about in 2010?
chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It was discontinued in 2011. Anything that is out there today is outdated at best, and malicious at worst.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Oracle bought (and quickly killed) it. It’s not under active development, and anything that claims otherwise is likely malicious. LibreOffice is a lot of the original OpenOffice devs who got fed up with the way things were going, and jumped ship.
haakon@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
It literally is.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Fredselfish@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What happened to Openoffice?
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oracle happened. pcworld.com/…/why-you-should-ditch-openoffice-and…
Seriously, fuck Oracle with a rusty rebar. They already ruined mysql.
mysql -> MariaDB OpenOffice -> LibreOffice
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oracle happened to it
All the devs went to LibreOffice after that
Speculater@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They were bought and made for profit.
takis@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I must be one of them. In the last couple of weeks I’m transitioning my apps and services to open source and EU based. I switched from Windows to CachyOS, switched my emails, switched browser, degoogled my phone, deleted FB and X and many more.
It feels so refreshing and free.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Good job! Welcome to Beltalowda :) Next up: join the OPA!
boreengreen@lemm.ee 2 months ago
That is allot of stuff in a short time. Nice!
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
[deleted]jaybone@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah I’m wondering for how many weeks.
And then how many millions of ms office users there are? (Or billions…)
bufalo1973@lemm.ee 2 months ago
And maybe those are only the one that download it directly. But every Linux user downloads it from other repos.
sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Nice. Maybe now Microsoft will respond by
offering non-subscription optionsinventing a new proprietary industry-standard file format so their bloated ransomware remains mandatory.cactopuses@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Fortunately platforms like docs are providing sufficient competition that I don’t think they’d be able to lock it down as effectively as they once could.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
They’ll have to settle for “warning” the user if they detect a file that was made by libreoffice.
passenger@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Sure, to avoid costs…
They really don’t see the connection with the trade war, buy european movement, boycott america movement, trump presidency in general… Really? Or just the editor told them not to mention it?
Apocalypteroid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
As someone who has recently cancelled my Microsoft subscription and switch to libre office I can vouch that it was not the subscription cost that made me switch.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
None of those have much real impact outside internet noise compared to people seeing their bank accounts drain.
I’ve been leaving corpo shit behind for years as a personal boycott, but even I found it much easier to invest time and effort moving off paid services than free ones because of a perceived material benefit beyond smug self-satisfaction.
gamer@lemm.ee 2 months ago
You’re looking for enemies where there are none. I’m not a medical professional, but I assume this amount of paranoia is not good for your mental health and well-being. Just take the article for what it is: a win for free software
passenger@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Sure, it is a win. And thank you for the wise words.
But to me it seems that many are looking to reduce dependency on US tech.
Unfortunately, world is such state that a little paranoia is warranted. If Snowden was not a wakeup call, now I finally feel there is a real movement to try to reduce the dependency. Keep in mind that the US currently threatens EU with occupation of Greenland and sides with our enemy.
But all that said, thank you again, kind stranger.
Trewtrew@lemmy.today 2 months ago
Came here to say this. The headline is misleading, the costs have been there for years. The thing that has changed are millions of Europeans and Canadians looking for American alternatives.
There was another article I saw related to a massive drop (over 70%!) in bookings between Canada and the US. It didn’t mention the reason for the drop in bookings. Not sure why the media is so reluctant to cover the massive American boycotts that are underway at the moment, especially on articles covering the impact.
MunkysUnkEnz0@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m glad to see foss Software taking off. In the past, we had to be a tech enthusiast to Realize it with an option. Now it’s pretty well known.
The large tech companies didn’t get greedy and try to be so gross with privacy settings. People wouldn’t make the move. They only have themselves to blame.
If you’re into music, there’s a great open source synthesizer.
orcrist@lemm.ee 2 months ago
[deleted]chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Been available for close to 40 years
MunkysUnkEnz0@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Well, I’ve been using this software forever, I’m saying now, normal folks, I see in the light.
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 2 months ago
I’ve been using lmms, but this looks amazing
gitamar@feddit.org 2 months ago
Don’t forget to seed the torrents to help the servers. And donate if you can ✊🏻
echodot@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Very few people will actually know how to do that.
goodthanks@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yes, but millenials have been doing it since we were kids. It’s not that hard, just embrace the joy of naughty computing.
gitamar@feddit.org 2 months ago
Donating is easy, just follow the url on the homepage. /s
mr_pip@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
what version(s) are best to help out? Windows 64 bit?
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 2 months ago
Probably, yes. You would assume the influx of users was mostly windows users.
Scrollone@feddit.it 2 months ago
Good idea. I’ll add it to my seedbox.
Legom7@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I have a job that involves working with spreadsheets. I have Librecalc at home and both Libre and MSOffice at work. I have also had a college course about using Excel specifically. Both really can do mostly the same things but because MS does everything in a specific (backwards) way, people trained on MS who are not otherwise “computer people” can’t cope with needing to unlearn and relearn. So the end result is paraprofessionals are locked in.
LordPassionFruit@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I really enjoyed spreadsheets before becoming a programmer (I still enjoy them, I just spend less time on them) and basically self taught over the years using Google Sheets.
There are several really useful functions on sheets that simply do not exist in Excel, and there are others that work almost the same but not quite. Having to use Excel drives me insane sometimes because of how clunky it feels.
By contrast, using LibreCalc feels kinda how you’d expect an open source Google Sheets to feel? It’s slightly clunkier, but it gets the job done and generally feels better to use than Excel
wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I’ve gone full circle
Loved sheets, then hated them because we should just use a DB
Now I do stuff in sheets with a tab explaining how I got the data because I can email it to someone and in 4 months it still answers their questions.
SirFasy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It doesn’t surprise me, Microsoft is enshitifying everything they have.
JakobFel@retrolemmy.com 2 months ago
Love to see it. I haven’t used MS Office in well over a decade at this point and I have no plans to go back. LibreOffice is fantastic, suits all my needs, doesn’t pack itself with bloat and it respects my freedom and privacy. What more can I want from an office suite?
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Dropped the Word suite and used openoffice, then switched to libreoffice. Definitely a slightly clunkier feel to it, but avoiding yet more subscription, cloud based, internet connection needed, account needed software is becoming more and more important.
Mustakrakish@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Been using openoffice for 15+ years, what made you switch to libreoffice?
FreeBooteR69@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Open office isn’t getting much in the way of updates these days and is considered dormant and maintained by the Apache foundation. Libre-office is the office suite maintained by the document foundation and is where the bulk of developers moved over to.
nahostdeutschland@feddit.org 2 months ago
Libreoffice was created as a fork of OpenOffice because the development of OO became stale due to Oracle. If you’re still on OpenOffice, try LibreOffice - it’s kind of the same, but better
Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Oracle.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Pretty much what everyone said, especially better import/export of microsoft document formats - but one of the things they didn’t mention is that LibreOffice can be easily downloaded and installed from repositories. If I do a fresh linux install it’s just a command line or some other software package installer away. Super easy. I find LibreOffice runs smoother. Only downside is that sometimes it takes a while to load.
joel_feila@lemmy.world 2 months ago
For me it was docx. Oo couldn’t get the formatting right but libre could. This was back when docx was new and i was in school ao the teachers didn’t take off for strange lines or bad formatting.
gamer@lemm.ee 2 months ago
For the past like decade the only “updates” OpenOffice has been getting are questionable code comment changes from one dude. These changes literally do nothing, and people have suggested that the only reason he does it is to make OpenOffice seem like it’s still being developed, even though it was abandoned long ago.
Why? IDK, but I think it’s just some stubborn asshole with an axe to grind with the LibreOffice project. OpenOffice still has stronger name recognition than LibreOffice, so a lot of people still use it.
snek_boi@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
If you’re going to download it, try the torrent option! That way, you can give back to the community that gives you LibreOffice.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Had no idea there was a torrent for it on its own. I always get it with apt.
_cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
It’s not just the subscription they want to avoid. Office has been steadily enshitified to the point nobody I know likes using it anymore.
gruhuken@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Teams has decided it won’t recognise like 50% of word docs anymore. So you can no longer edit them within teams and have to download them. If you simply read and scroll down it, the scroll glitches so bad for no reason. Ugh
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 2 months ago
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.
echodot@feddit.uk 2 months ago
It started going downhill when they got rid of word art.
RedFrank24@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The funny thing is you can still buy Office standalone but you have to actively go looking for it and Microsoft doesn’t advertise it because 365 subscriptions make more money.
Microsoft actively doesn’t want you buying standalone versions of software, but they still have to sell it because there’s still a market for it.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
The way the write “best value” on the offer for 8.50 £/month is just brazen.
If you use Office Home 2024 for 120£ for just 15 months or more it’s already cheaper.
Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world 2 months ago
And if you monitor Slickdeals, you can often get a copy for under $40.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What’s annoying, too, is that a lot of the methods that have traditionally been used for discounts (education, nonprofit, employer-based discounts) are now only applicable to the subscriptions. So if you do want to get a standalone copy and would ordinarily qualify for a discount, you can’t apply that discount to that license.
MetalMachine@feddit.nl 2 months ago
European countries should adopt linux and these alternatives instead of paying for windows and Microsoft. Much more private too.
lumony@lemmings.world 2 months ago
Is it just me, or do new office features seem kinda pointless or unnecessary?
I use libreoffice the same way I used microsoft office decades ago. Never really cared for ‘advanced’ or even ‘intermediate’ features because they are never necessary to what I’m doing.
I can’t imagine that people who are more computer-illiterate than me getting significantly more involved in what should be simple and easy to use programs.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Is it just me, or do new office features seem kinda pointless or unnecessary?
I feel like almost all the updates of the last two decades have been:
- Security updates in a code base that was traditionally quite vulnerable to malware.
- Technical updates in taking advantage of the advances in hardware, through updated APIs in the underlying OS. We pretty seamlessly moved from single core, 32-bit x86 CPU tasks to multicore x86-64 or ARM, with some tasks offloaded to GPUs or other specialized chips.
- Some improvement in collaboration and sharing, unfortunately with a thumb on the scale to favor other Microsoft products like SharePoint or OneDrive or Outlook/Exchange.
- Some useless nonsense, like generative AI.
Some of these are important (especially the first two), but the user experience shouldn’t change much for them.
Alaknar@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Some useless nonsense, like generative AI.
This is a very ignorant and prejudiced take.
AI in Excel is an amazing feature that will help TONNES of people do what they never could It can design tables and write (but not insert) advanced formulas for the user.
Sure, you could say “just be an Excel expert”, but - for example - my daily work is nowhere near Excel. Learning its advanced features would be a 100% waste of time, just to be able to prep a fancy chart every couple of years. So, instead, I can just ask Copilot to do that fancy thing for me, instead of wasting hours online, trying to figure out XLOOKUP, or some such.
firepenny@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Besides the jank, you can set up libreoffice inside a docker container and server it over https. There you now off cheap-ass MS365.
Sauvandu60@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
This is a great news! I hope more people would use open-source software like Libreoffice.
clot27@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I replaced MS Office with libreoffice on my dad’s PC and he didnt even noticed for months. Libreoffice is just better.
turnip@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
We should all get Signal as well. If you don’t have it you’ll probably be surprised how many of your contacts do.
MrSulu@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Hopefully more of us make donations. Free is good, but it’s nice to contribute even small amounts to your well used FOSS apps
sudoer777@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
If you’re a nerd, also check out Typst and LaTeX. Being able to format your documents with pure code is awesome, and you can also define functions for different things, import libraries to generate graphs, and write comments that don’t show up in the document.
Brotha_Jaufrey@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’ve used Libre Office, but unpopular opinion, the formatting sucks. I just pirated word, never paying for that again
Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 months ago
For me it was about freedom, and not being locked into the Microsoft sphere.
penpapernovel@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
My biggest pet peeve is since it’s a suite rather than separate programs, there’s only one path for saving files that’s saved. So you can’t have Writer save to a different location from Calc automatically.
As someone with a lot of files and folders, and a hatred of having to click around too much, this annoys the shit out of me. But I don’t think there’s any way around it because of how the program was created. It’s literally the one thing keeping me from switching.
hornedfiend@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
I managed to get my father in law to fully switch to libreoffice, which is in itself a great achievement, as he’s almost 70 and he used to be an msoffice user for most of his adult professional life.
Libreoffice is just great and Europe should start backing and using more open source, non greedy corporate backed projects.
gargle@lemmy.world 2 months ago
LibreCalc and python for the win! I just love from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, import json, import re, import urllib.request.
trashboat@midwest.social 2 months ago
I’ve gradually been switching over. The UI is somewhat confusing in my experience- but the MSO UX+UI is consistently getting much, much worse as time passes
vane@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah desktop apps era is back baby. Fuck you cloud.
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Syncthing has been so helpful in making me move away from cloud based options. And to think only reason I found out about it and gave it a shot was because I was trying to figure out how to easily sync my non Steam game save files between my Desktop and my Steam Deck. It’s been invaluable since then.
baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Donate if you regularly use Syncthing. Help close the causal loop.
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 2 months ago
That is a very cool project that I’d never heard of. Thanks for sharing!
azalty@jlai.lu 2 months ago
How does that differ from something like Nextcloud?
ripcord@lemmy.world 2 months ago
OnlyOffice is also good - my preferred for the basic Word/Excel type stuff I do.
OscarRobin@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah I love LibreOffice’s customisability including sidebar etc, but OnlyOffice just performs a lot better and handles the most common formats better for me
tantalizer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah! To me LibreOffice just looks dated and, to be honest, shit. OnlyOffice has a much cleaner interface.
Condiment2085@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Woowoo! Cloud has its place and I love it but it’s not for literally everything
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Never even qualified for SOLDIER.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
And has to cope by pretending he’s literally this other dude
bufalo1973@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Not so far. LibreOffice has a network version.