Which is entirely tragic, because LibreOffice is good, I respect hand coding more than the products of a prompt slot machine.
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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Is it though?
I try it but it doesn’t feel good. It feels like a clone of Office 2004.
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I just installed it, open an xlsx file, it opens to the document explorer panel not my document.
Okay, weird, where’s my file? Open it again.
It’s your first time here, customize the app! Here are 5 different UI paradigms to choose from. Okay, I guess compact?
Don’t forget the theme! Sure, okay, use automatic theme and default 2004 style icons.
LibreOffice needs to restart to apply settings. I watched it dynamically update in the background, but okay.
Restarts Tip of the day: you can change your appearance settings! Run this action now? No. Why? Close.
Okay, I spent all that time customizing my tab bar, and yet, Calc doesn’t use a tab bar, so there’s no change at all after all that? No idea if that’s a macOS thing or not because it puts the toolbar values in the menu bar.
Okay, well let’s make a pivot table. Seems decent, it’s a clean Excel clone here, decent functionality. Needs a count distinct and some custom aggregations.
What’s this “Data” field though? Drag it to first slot: LibreOffice hard crashes. At least it saved my document.
Reopen file, let’s zoom out. Click and drag zoom slider, it creates a glitched rectangle around the active cell that tears vs rest of screen that doesn’t always update. It looks like the full page only zooms on certain values while deagging, but on release that sticks.
Let’s make a chart. Select 3 items plus total in my pivot. Click chart button. 3 bars in the chart, where my total bar? Data field is blocked out on pivot take charts. Change chart type, wait 3 seconds for a re render. Try to move the chart but have to click off first.
Okay, let’s delete the chart now. Press delete button: “This function cannot be completed on the selected objects”. Huh? Oh I have to click off, then select the chart again, then delete it.
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That was my 10 minute experiment. It feels just as bad in a web browser. The Skia renderer is so much better than the old system, but like, I found all this crap in 10 minutes.
I really want this to be good, but it needs a critical editor to go through it with a fine toothed comb. Honestly, they should crib Google Sheets, since it’s got a better interface than Excel now.
Ima be honest, I use it like all the time and I've never had a problem with it. Especially to the degree that you're saying you had in just 10 min.
If youre fluent with Office tools then you should be able to use it.
The only single thing I noticed explicitly that bugged me was it not opening template files as a new file so if I saved it would save over the template.
You can argue that the math editor kind of sucks, which fair, if I was doing a discrete mathematics paper I'd be doing it in LaTeX which has like decades of modules and academia behind it
LibreOffice just outright stating their policy of 'no AI' as a feature made me respect them so much more.
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It's only tragic for a month, after which the other project gets abandoned because its unmaintainable or the vibecoder got bored and moved on to another viral idea
I'm not going to switch to something unless I know its going to be around when I need it
abandoned because its unmaintainable
Exactly this. It's hard enough maintaining my own code. It can take a good 15 mins or so to familiarise myself with something I haven't worked on in a short while. Seeing code that isn't mine is very challenging. Not the code itself, but the methods and structures used by the other person. All that has to be done before hunting bugs and adjusting features. Then of course there's the things you don't know about that can be easily missed.
An AI would need to thoroughly know the code and detailed context on the decisions behind it all, every session, in order to be able to maintain it with vibe, because the vibe coder won't know any of this.
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It's good enough that my 75yo mother picked it up without trouble when I switched her to Mint after W10 went EoL.
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that doesn't work
You see, they took the efforts to replicate Microsoft excel experience.
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And Libreoffice is great. I got through grad school using it. I had to look up a lot of the button locations and formulas but not having Onedrive hork up everything made it all worth it.
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For anyone not already aware, there was a push in the early 2000s to require government documents to be in a standard format rather than giving a specific vendor (Microsoft) unfair advantage (official government endorsement). LibreOffice (OpenOffice at the time) used the standardized ODF format, which should've pushed many European governments to switch to an open source office suite. Instead, Microsoft bribed a bunch of people to push through their "OOXML" format as a standard, even though it was just a snapshot of Office's behavior, bugs and all.
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"... an AI slop version of Microsoft Office that doesn't fucking work" also known as Microsoft Office 365
Decompilation projects are getting attention right now because AI models being able to do it is a new thing. Essentially the end of closed source is a huge deal and people haven't realized the implications..
This. I am so demoralised as a SWE who was trying to get out of working for a morally objectionable company by working on passion projects and selling them as apps. Guess I need to find something else… again.
Depends. Hand-written apps will still be more valuable than slopped ones as they're far more trustworthy and less generic (like, literally), not to mention people being environmentally conscious about their choices. A good, trustworthy app that respects the user (and therefore omits e.g. privacy invasion) is still worth a few bucks to many.
I don't mean this to be snippy but people don't give a shit how or who wrote the code.
Most people will never know either way. If you download an app from an app store you don't know what the code looks like.
Also software devs like to think they are clever and valuable because big tech has been pumping them up for a couple decades but the business doesn't actually give a shit how a feature gets implemented only that it was and the customers value it.
LLMs are perfectly capable of writing correct code. The main issue with them is the pace of change which has been greatly accelerated and how it can eclipse the rate a dev can understand the change.
I know people like to claim that every thing they make is slop but that ignores that basically the entire industry is using it to varying amounts and are unlikely to stop going forward.
It's a confirmation bias thing.
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Calling decompilation the “end of closed-source” is way too hyperbolic.
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Had the same reaction with the Photoshop ai clone when se already have projects like gimp
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I disagree, their efforts don't go unnoticed. Their recent no-AI claims prompted me to donate.
LibreOffice - the only office suite that handles tables correct, even when multiple users change the document 🥳
a couple of months ago i asked about this one of local Forbes editors and they explained this phenomenon as "because it is expected to code by hand but managing to vibe anything is amazing". i decided not to continue this conversation because that's fucking stupid
“because it is expected to code by hand but managing to vibe anything is amazing”.
I don't think it's wise to stake the future of computing on "It's not that the bear dances well, it's that the bear dances at all."
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I don't like LibreOffice but any actual Open Source dev deserves infinite more respect than those prompstitutes.
Tinfoil hat time:
A year ago, I did some reverse engineering. I figured a pattern matching engine has to be good matching patterns, so I threw the messed-up output of Ghidra into Claude to clean it up and to give me an overview of what the fuck happens in a certain part.
I was absolutely surprised. Sure, it got some things wrong, but it knew way more than it should have been able to guess from that short bit of fucked up, optimised not-quite-C. Including guessing context that it should not be able to guess. This was a firmware with not-yet-released functions that, to my knowledge, shouldn't exist outside of this bit of binary firmware. At least not for us non-NDA mortals.
At the time, Mistral had a new-ish model as well, so I figured I'd give it a try. It worked as expected, cleaned up things, gave variables reasonable names, made educated guesses and so on, but didn't act as if it had background info. And I was using Sonnet 4.x, so the small Claude which shouldn't be that much larger.
Since then, I have the conspiracy theory that the Claude people threw a bunch of proprietary sources in the training, too. I have no idea how, maybe aggressively training on user inputs? Anyway, this does not help to allalleviate my suspicions.
Since then, I have the conspiracy theory that the Claude people threw a bunch of proprietary sources in the training, too.
An enormous amount of people use this technology for privat company data without batting an eye; not just software developers, but business people for reports, etc.
They all throw their confidential data in there without even considering the implications, just "trusting" Anthropic. claude code bots are running on tens of thousands of proprietary code bases that used to be private, and of course they are using all this data to train their model.
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To be fair, neither does the real MS office
Long live Libre devs!! Been with yall for over a decade
The only reason Microsoft exists today is because of Exchange and an old market share on consumer/prosumer OS.
They're a glorified email hosting company and an embarrassment to software development. Idc what AI does to their shitty software. Fucking hate Outlook.
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I'm going out on a limb here, but I don't think the kind of person who contributes to FOSS projects get into it for the fame and attention.
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It feels disengenuous to say people vibe code things.
I know it's correct English, I just think it's kind of a bullshit statement.
When dumbasses talk to AI's and the AI's do things for them, it's wild to think the credit goes to the dumbasses.
This is like your boss saying he did all your dev work and calling it "boss coding".
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