It looks a bit clunky, but it does the job – and on your own computer
The latest semi-annual release of LibreOffice, the cross-platform FOSS office suite, is out – and it’s gleefully throwing some shade. The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 26.8 – and sent The Register a press pack before it did so. We’re not going to go through it in great depth: it’s a mature suite, and most Linux distros bundle it by default, even some of the slightly strange ones. We do like some of the sly notes in the launch materials, though, starting with the headline: “LibreOffice 26.8 brings professional typography, deeper support for the world’s writing systems, and no artificial intelligence” No artificial intelligence. In 2026, this is a bold position statement, but it is merited. In the last six months, we have reported on The Document Foundation distancing itself from Collabora. We spoke to some representatives of TDF – and Collabora – at considerable length about this, but we came away unconvinced by TDF’s arguments. Collabora developers contribute much of the code in LibreOffice. For instance, the last time we covered a new release of LibreOffice, we mentioned its rich Markdown support. Collabora told us that its engineers developed this. And yet, TDF decided to restart development of its own cloud-based office suite, in direct competition with Collabora Office. Later we covered the release of Collabora CODE 26.04 – which is Collabora’s local office suite, based on LibreOffice FOSS code, but rendered inside the browser using web technologies. Collabora’s announcement places AI integration front and centre. That caused us some dismay, and we told the company’s representatives that. They replied that Collabora’s partners and users were requesting this, and it felt it had to comply. As such, we are pleased by TDF’s stance with LibreOffice. It is a native app, with separate ports for Windows, and Linux, and macOS. All run as native local apps, they do so entirely on your machine, and they do not attempt to save anything into “cloud storage” for you. Your software, your data, on your computer, on your premises. For us, that is how it should be. As The Register has also reported recently, TDF is also firmly against using MS Office file formats by default. We do see its point here, but there are pragmatic reasons for this. Despite this strong ideological stance, the LibreOffice 26.8 press kit included both LibreOffice’s native .ODT files, and also MS Office .DOCX files. We do keep a decade-old and unsupported copy of MS Word around on our Mac, although we rarely use it. So, from curiosity, we opened both – and this is what it looked like. In our personal subjective judgement, the MS Word version looks a lot better. Our copy of LibreOffice 26.02 was configured with a Microsoft-style Ribbon, and to be fair, the screenshot shows that older version, before we upgraded. It doesn’t look much different in the newer version, though. We like and recommend LibreOffice. There are alternatives for Linux users: we compared OnlyOffice and WPS Office a few years ago. WPS Office is freeware, rather than FOSS, but it works. The Chinese edition of Ubuntu Kylin included it in place of LibreOffice. OnlyOffice is based on cloud tech, but you can run it locally… and for cloud-based stuff, as well as OnlyOffice and Collabora Online, there’s the new EuroOffice from Nextcloud. If you don’t mind paying, or if you’d prefer a European-made office suite, then there’s Softmaker Office. But LibreOffice is right here, it’s completely free, and it works well. We like the local-first stance and we like the AI-free stance. Version 26.8 has multiple improvements: improved internationalization, and support for different alphabets and writing systems. It’s available in 120 different languages. It has better paragraph and formatting handling, ARIA support for better screen-reader handling to improve accessibility, and much more. It really is all good. We regularly write that it’s a very good idea for Microsoft Office users to keep it installed just in case – it is much better at recovering damaged Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files than their native apps. As we also regularly point out, anyone who still has OpenOffice installed should remove it and replace it with LibreOffice as soon as possible. OpenOffice is still available, but as Dedoimedo found on 26.8’s day of release, you really should not use it any more. Saying that, we’re concerned about TDF positioning itself as a rival to Collabora, rather than – well – collaborating with the company which provides more LibreOffice developers than any other external contributor. TDF has long offered two branches of LibreOffice: an older stable branch, for business users, and the current version, which gets relatively frequent minor updates. For us, the pragmatic position would have been for TDF to offer the current version, and direct business users to Collabora for the slower-moving stable release… but when we suggested this idea to TDF’s representatives, they treated the idea with scorn. The future remains uncertain. In a business world embracing “AI”, focusing on cloud apps, plus the lucrative new sovereign cloud movement, LibreOffice looks a bit old and dowdy. But it’s a vital tool.Traditional local-first tools like LibreOffice aid reusing old computers rather than replacing them. Ignore the “thought leaders” – the world needs LibreOffice more than ever. ®
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