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  • Hacker News
  • Nah, it is probably due to AI agents' love for Libre Office. Codex prefers Libre Office for docs. Other agents may do this as well.

    People who have never known about Libre Office are now downloading and using Libre Office (often without realizing it).

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49527396

    by vayup
  • It’s also been baked into Codex. Go figure
    by piker
  • i think that's a perfectly coherent and reasonable way for both these apps to work.

    people don't want AI features leaking into their non-ai apps. I'm not an AI hater - I want my AI app to be able to read and write word docs, but when i decide to open up libreoffice i'm doing that because i want to write something myself, not use AI. i don't need my word processor to bundle an inferior version of what the ChatGPT can do for me.

    by notatoad
  • 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.
    by empath75
  • Explains the download records as well
    by jkahrs595
  • It's open source software - it can be baked into pretty much anything given they follow the license terms.
    by thenewnewguy
  • 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.
    by mchusma
  • Presumably. The headless CLI part of libreoffice is even included in Codex and Claude Code.
    by datakan
  • 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.
    by russfink
  • I wonder how much of this is also driven by Microsofts current downward trajectory, I and others have switched to linux this year.
    by dwayne_dibley
  • It's also used as a headless office document editor by openai models so... does that impact their metrics?
    by library8848
  • Let's use AI to test the validity of an AI generated clickbait article.

    Fable 5.1 was presented with the following prompt to do research.

    > https://manualdousuario.net/en/libreoffice-download-record-n... states an interesting causality. Generate an artifact that tests this claim. Is it causal or coincidental. ie if libreoffice downloads have been increasing every release then it's possible to claim any recent feature change is responsible for the download. You need to get access to the download stats and then see what other major features could be responsible

    https://funny-taffy-f8d6c0.netlify.app/

    Conclusion is that the claim is speculative.

    (This post was meat written. The report is AI generated content. )

    by injidup
  • The article says LibreOffice is almost 20 years old. Well, before it was LibreOffice it was OpenOffice in 2000 and before it was OpenOffice it was StarOffice and StarWriter originates in 1985. So you could say it (or the Writer component) is 41 years old.
    by panzi
  • Could also be due to the fact that every codex install includes a copy of libreoffice
    by jgbuddy
  • what? why?
    by ngruhn
  • 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.
    by paxys
  • 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!
    by rietta
  • > normalizing document formats for analysis

    What do you mean here? Normalizing it into ODF format? Does that limit which tools/libraries you can use to analyze it?

    by mmooss
  • 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.
    by hn_submit
  • I have an app with several AI features that I will not mentioning use AI at all because its completely irrelevant and the users will hate it for no reason.
    by anthonypasq
  • For enterprise software it's a feature. For most consumer software it's an anti-feature. Each of these crowds are on opposite ends of the same axis: the executive class coalesces around the mantra that LLMs bring automation benefits that will positively affect the org's bottom line. The populist belief is that LLMs and generative models are at best annoying and at worst anti-human.

    At the risk of sounding trite there is a kernel of truth to both of these camps and things will eventually shake out. As LLM capabilities plateau and people broadly realize that they excel in domains that don't require discretion or taste the market will settle someplace in the middle.

    I'm flexing my PM muscles by working on small personal projects and am constantly asking myself 1) what problem is what I'm building solving, 2) which parts of solving this problem are largely janitorial/annoying, then 3) could an LLM be leveraged (not used, leveraged) to reduce struggle. My golf app and fitness tracker telling me "lol u 3-putted too many holes" or "bro yr sleep is cooked - have you tried breathing slowly" do not fall into this category. Feeding an apartment lease into an LLM and having it enumerate the ways that my landlord is trying to push the boundaries of tenant law does.

    by alexjplant
  • 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.
    by dewey
  • 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.

    by infecto
  • For my text editor, KeenWrite[1], 42% of users answered that they'd use AI. Since the majority don't want it, no AI has been added.

    [1]: https://keenwrite.com/

    by thangalin
  • That's a blanket statement. People like AI when it's actually useful, like photo editing tools that can remove unwanted objects from the background. Or how in iOS 27 they added AI to the Shortcuts app so you can describe a shortcut and it'll build it for you. It's turned the app into something I practically never used to something that's actually got me automating repetitive tasks on my phone.

    The issue is the past few years of AI being shoved into everything with no taste being applied because it impresses shareholders. If you implement it in a way where it's actually useful, people will like it.

    by hbn
  • 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.

    by cosmic_cheese
  • 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.

    by Aurornis
  • What methods do these "downloads" include?

    Standard Linux software is often obtained through package management. Is LibreOffice self-updating? Is an update counted as a "download"? What about the torrents, Snap, Microsoft Store...?

    https://www.libreoffice.org/download-other/

    by ButlerianJihad
  • I wouldn't say that's flat at all, if you switch to the "architecture" graph it gives a clearer picture without the between-version artefacts of dips that don't exist: https://stats.documentfoundation.org/downloads#month,arch

    What matters more than the peaks are the floors, which are clearly increasing.

    by xnorswap
  • > Switching to the monthly view

    I'd hardly consider fluctuations between 2.2 million and 3.3 million dowloads "flat".

    Also, the metric used in the article was "downloads in the first week after a new release", which apparently broke a record. Regardless of the reason behind that record breaking number, switching to monthly dowloads to see if there is a sudden surge in popularity seems like the wrong metric.

    by vanderZwan