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- cross-posted to:
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Thank you to the skilled developers who bailed on OpenOffice when the shit stain company Oracle bought Sun, and formed LibreOffice.
I can only hope there will always be digital freedom fighters on the side of good.
I’ve donated to LibreOffice, and you should too, if you use their suite.
No, I don’t think they will. LibreOffice
No they won’t
“Fuck you, Microsoft.” -Everyone, at all times
Even if you’re not ready to come to Linux, you’re definitely ready to switch to LibreOffice. I dare you to try it.
I’m using OnlyOffice bins on linux and find it to be a fantastic suite for my (minimal) uses. Not sure how it works on Windows though.
I’m unclear on the differences between OpenOffice (which I genuinely thought was retired, didn’t realize it was still a thing) and LibreOffice. If it ever gives you trouble, do make the switch.
OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.
Ah. I tried that a few times and didn’t care for it myself. Weird that my brain thought it saw OpenOffice.
It’s still being kept barely alive for whatever reason. But it hasn’t gotten any reasonable updates (I think not even including security updates as of recently, see https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice-vs-openoffice/ ).
See also https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/
Writer and Impress should cover Word and Powerpoint perfectly. Even if your colleagues use Windows, you can still open them just fine.
Excel though is troublesome, especially those with coded VBA or some plugins from companies. But for basic Excel? Calc can do the job ok too.
How will this work for (for example) cibersecurity companies that have reports full of client’s vulnerabilities and can’t have them hosted in third parties?
I would guess we’re on the fuck around part and your question will be answered on the find out part
By their admins setting HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\General PreferCloudSaveLocations to 0 using GPO probably
This is certainly about making sure your files are safe and definitely not about stealing your data for training AI. /s
Don’t let Murdersoft steal your data. Don’t contribute to their corruption or genocide assistance.
Step 1: https://fedoraproject.org/
Step 2: https://www.libreoffice.org/Thanks, going to try out LibreOffice. Does it has same (or similar) functions as Word itself?
No. That’s the point. LibreOffice does not send your data to Microsoft.
LibreOffice is what Microsoft Office WAS without the bugs. If Word and Excel worked for you before the cloud, Libre is golden.
It’s designed to be very similar. If you are already familiar with Word, you should feel right at home.
I’m not exactly s power user in Microsoft office, but I found using libre office to be very similar. Never had issues using it for school back in the day and I’m sure it’s better now.
I’ve been using it for over a decade now and have only rarely come across broken documents due to proprietary features. If you’re making docs for yourself, I’d say it’s pretty much a 100% replacement. Things can get a bit more fucky if you’re having exchanges where you edit with Libre and someone else edits with Word. But other than that, they’re pretty darn close.
It doesn’t make it flawless (at all), but installing the microsoft fonts helps. Most distros have a package or helper tool for that.
Pretty much. It was OpenOffice years ago, but then Oracle got involved and so all the devs left and put a new name on it.
As a clueless individual, how are they assisting genocide?
For today, you can call me Jeeves. To learn more, a quick search for “microsoft genocide” or “microsoft gaza” will give you the answers.
- https://www.newarab.com/features/ex-microsoft-employees-expose-companys-role-gaza-genocide
- https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/21/tech/microsoft-employee-protests-israel-intl
- https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-israel-protests-2000648637
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cger582weplo
- https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-asked-fbi-for-help-tracking-palestinian-protests/
Wow thanks for the resources! I appreciate you dropping links I had no idea this was going on. Of course Google and Amazon are involved too, could have figured as much. Appears the only way do avoid the military industrial complex is to cease using anything provided from our oligarch overlords. What an age we live in.
Working hand in hand with the Israeli government in mass surveillance and (likely) AI-generated targeting data.
Another user just linked some resources. Incredible the bullshit going on these days. So much going on it’s hard for me to keep up with it all but I’m glad to be enlightened.
This feature doesn’t even work.
So many times I’ll save a word doc, attach it to outlook, and it’ll silently attach an older version of the word doc.
Word says its up to date, one drive says its up to date, but outlook still gets an old version.
It takes hours to resolve. Everything Microsoft wastes so much of my time.
What if I dont use M$ account? So it is just a local user, then where does Word back up to?
This is why Microsoft is making it damn near impossible to set up a new computer without logging into a Microsoft account. Luckily the OOBE trick still works (for now).
LibreOffice. No need for MS Office, ever
You’re thinking as an individual. Excel in the business is what keeps Office afloat. There simply is no substitute. Even if you want to go with another spreadsheet, who’s going to trust that to faithfully import Excel data?
I’m not sure I even trust Excel to import an Excel file without mangling it.
you guys are able to save an excel file without it nuking everything?
Tell that to my companies president.
https://www.libreoffice.org/ for anyone who wants microsoft to stop messing with their office apps.
There is also only office which has better compatibility with MSOffice file types
This here.
I wish Only Office got as much fanfare as LibreOffice. The UI is much closer to Microsoft Office and it tends to have better compatibility.
I have both installed though and use them both lol.
OnlyOffice is Russian-owned, via a holding company in Singapore. When Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions threatened the business, they obfuscated this, but it’s still Lev Bannov’s product.
The importance you attach to this is up to you, but they try quite hard to hide it.
LibreOffice has a ribbon UI too.
That it does :)
LibreOffice is awesome too. No complaints really.
Libreoffice their latest blogpost is from the 20th of August 2025. There have been a few releases in the past few months as well.
Openoffice their latest ( Apache Openoffice 4.1.15 ) was released almost 2 years ago ( December 2023 ).
Libreoffice seems like a more recent, better supported tool over Openoffice which hasn’t seen any updates since 2023 according to their own website.
I’m on my phone, so I didn’t search extensively. But I think that also plays a role in why there’s a much larger fanbase for libreoffice rather than Openoffice.
I’ve no recent experience with either so I can’t comment on how well either works.
Edit: I looked up the wrong one. My statement remains correct w.r.t. Openoffice, but they mentioned Onlyoffice which is a different product.
I believe Open Office and Only Office are different products.
Only Office had a major release in June, 2025.
And you are correct that Open Office last update was back in December 2023.
openoffice is an apache project, created when oracle gave them the code and rights to the openoffice project. ibm later donated symphony to them. anyone familiar with apache knows they do things their own way, and usually slowly.
libreoffice originated from a fork when openoffice’s status under oracle was in doubt. it progresses faster than apache, as most developers also switched.
onlyoffice is an entirely different application. decent enough, but with its own quirks. it can also be slow on lower-spec systems due to the heavy reliance on js. originally a latvian-russian project, it was reorganized (via new corporate entities in uk and sg) to hide the russian ties for ‘reasons’.
Man, wouldn’t it be nice if both of our counties didn’t have ridiculous propaganda and fascism so that we could just cooperate on shit like this without having to worry as much about maliciousness on a state level?
Ah I see. Thanks for the information. I use both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice and generally am happy with both. I kind of just bounce around back and forth.
You are correct. I misread ( or my brain farted ) and looked up the wrong one.
I second this. There’s a little bit of a learning curve on some of the functionality, but it’s not bad at all. And most of the functionality is very easy to find. I moved over to Libre Office several years ago and it’s been great.
Office would have a learning curve too if you hadn’t been using it since you were a child.
Tbf it was simplier back when people first used it
When people were first using it they were coming from DOS or older machines. Many were using a mouse for the first time. It wasn’t simpler to them.
You can now enable a tabbed interface similar to Microsoft Office
tell your friends.
OnlyOffice gang https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx
I like the idea of it, but it is Russian.
I think it they are based in Latvia now which is in Europe. They did originally start in Russia and still supply the Russian government. Though it is free and open source. So where it is based does not really matter.
OnlyOffice is one of the few open source applications which actually puts effort into its UI. LibreOffice looks straight from 1990. I really would not recommend LibreOffice to anyone who is not technical, whereas OnlyOffice provides a great UI experience.
With the entire West supporting a livestreamed genocide the whole moral highground schtick does not really land for me anymore either.
Let’s say this huge breach of security and privacy is okay.
How are Microsoft ensuring these sensitive documents are not being transferred via or stored on servers located in hostile countries with lax data laws (such as foreign nations like the USA?).
Microsoft has already said it doesn’t matter where your data is stored, it isn’t safe from the United States.
But you can change this behaviour in settings, it’s just the default for now.
So, if you don’t trust Microsoft to handle your documents, but still somehow use MS Word and OneDrive, for the moment you can still stop it from saving your Word documents to their servers.
You can change it for now.
Yes, that’s what I meant with my “for now” and “for the moment”.
Ms office 2016 install still going strong with zero cloud function. That day I lose it is the day LibreOffice copies itself from the laptop to the desktop. Aint paying for O365
wdym, that’s the point
Per the article this can be deactivated
Turning it on by default (opt-out instead of opt-in) is still a huge concern and needs spreading the word about.
Oh very much so. Casual users are going to be donating their documents for AI processing and not even know it
I suppose this means Microsoft will not count Word doc file sizes against users’ cloud storage quotas, right? Right??
No, they upload your file, delete the local file, then oopsie, you ran out of cloud storage, please pay $99/month to access your files.
🤣
It’ll be like Google: everything goes in, nothing comes out unless you jump through difficult hoops, price continually goes up.
If you’re in the EU, you can apply for a GDPR request to get sent a copy of all your data in their cloud, same for iCloud. Takes about 48 hours in my experience.
Getting anything out is already almost impossible. I moved sway from 3rd party cloud storage a couple years back. I had to get 500gb from onedrive and it was refusing to download at anything more than 50kb/s (my internet was significantly better than that)
Where do you think Google learned it?
? Google invented it.
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