LibreOffice - the only office suite that handles tables correct, even when multiple users change the document 🥳
that doesn’t work
You see, they took the efforts to replicate Microsoft excel experience.
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.
Do windows next! WA and IG too! Might as well go whole hog on the corpos.
I mean windows is already vibe coded
They need to implement the rest of the Wine stub functions. That would make it 100% compatible with windows applications…
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.
I think its over for us, and most other knowledge based jobs eventually. I have no idea where this is going.
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.
Guess I need to find something else… again.
Keep in mind that all of these projects cost a fuckton of money. This cannot go on forever.
You only need to slay the giants…
If someone does that to an app you’re actively selling you’re well within your rights to C&D them.
Reverse engineering isn’t illegal. It’s how projects like Wine are possible.
LibreOffice is great, but it has some glaring issues that keep it out of the mainstream. In my experience it can’t handle multiple monitors with different scaling, comments on 365 don’t import, formulas in sheets break, etc.
Some of these issues come from Microsoft, but other FOSS office suites like OPENOFFICE have overcome them so it’s doable.
I get the sense their tech stack is very rigid so that may be why iteration is slowed.
This. As much as I want LibreOffice to succeed (AND I WANT LIBREOFFICE TO SUCCEED SO SIT DOWN YOU IN THE BACK), having converted actual work projects over to LibO and maintain them has been hell, to say the least.
2026 and tables and text boxes still explode the document into confetti if you look at it funny. Hours of frustratingly reconstructing documents, or reloading progress saves because moving a text box one pixel over makes things explode.
LibO needs QA and maintenance fixes, badly. If you don’t want LibO to use AI models to bug hunt, then enlist and help fix it. Development in turning LibO from a messy desk project to something actually useable efficiently has taken literal decades already.
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.
Same. LibreOffice and Latex
LaTeX, really? Its like evil markdown.
If you want to typeset math, yes really. And IMO formatting control in LaTeX is unmatched and then some in word processors.
Plus TikZ is incredible.
lmao real
Overall Libre Office works fantastic. My only gripes is inserting an image into a document is way worse than word still, but overall it’s only a mild inconvenience.
Word only gets worse each update, and libre just gets better each update
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.
Which is entirely tragic, because LibreOffice is good, I respect hand coding more than the products of a prompt slot machine.
‘prompt slot machine’ <- I’m borrowing that
Enjoy, its such a good turn of phrase!
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
That rule where something is expected to last in the future as long as it already has in the past probably applies here
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.
To me, its tragic for exactly that reason; the vibiot, is lavished and rewarded with attention, when they don’t even understand the outputs from their prompt slot machine. So when they get bored or confused by their projects and chase the next craze…The person that should’ve gotten the accolades for understanding and maintaining their work, is forgotten still. I don’t like this timeline, its a stupid time to be alive.
LibreOffice just outright stating their policy of ‘no AI’ as a feature made me respect them so much more.
It’s good enough that my 75yo mother picked it up without trouble when I switched her to Mint after W10 went EoL.
Had the same reaction with the Photoshop ai clone when se already have projects like gimp
Jesus fuck did the LLM slop bots come out?
Why the fuck is everyone in favor of slop apps now?
The comments here are insane
This is actually one of the best things of this year. First they shit on adobe and now Microsoft, the two most hated and worst hurdles in the way of people switching to Linux. I’m actually predicting that there will be regulations now by the government over this stuff (it won’t work or do anything of course because it’s not even touching their code base) since our government loves money and corporations more than humans.
I see it as a proof of concept. Whether these products deliver or not doesnt matter. What matters is components within proprietary tools can now be replicated in a fast and effective way.
Not everything from AI is slop. AI in the hands of good developers can be powerful and help make open source projects more productive. It needs careful governance and quality control, but this kind of stuff helps level the playing field as resource limited projects can do more with what they’ve got.
Without commenting on Microsoft and Adobe specifically, because I couldn’t care less about their fates, I find the prospect of no longer being able to make a living from making and selling software deeply depressing.
I could put my heart and soul into an app, stick it on a marketplace, and someone gets their LLM to RE the binary back into source code to repackage and distribute it. LLMs were built on theft but now they enable even more of it. As a SWE I’m quite demoralised.
I really did want to get out of selling my hours to an evil corporation by instead selling my own works of passion as apps, but this has really thrown a spanner in the works. I don’t want to have to use an always-online SaaS/licencing model instead, because I believe consumers should own things. This does feel like the final straw pushing me out of software entirely.
I might dislike ai, but if that thing ends up taking users away from microsoft, so be it. It’s a greater cause
what is this referring to?
Probably this: https://getartcraft.com/apps/wordcraft
claude, make everything on my website a pointless animation. No i don’t care about readability.
i feel like everytime this is my old man yells at cloud moment but i really hope we don’t get a web where every single element has to slide in.
At least it’s viewable without javascript.
Well that’s pretty much this age’s version of animated gifs everywhere
In the cloud era of the internet we‘ll all be shouting at clouds.
Oh my god my framerate! How the hell do you make a WEBSITE lag?!
By vibecoding it
The ArtCraft suite.
Someone has been creating open source clones of the most popular industry standard programs that have been enshitified to oblivion like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office. They’re free and open source. I don’t think they’re nearly as bad as what the meme suggest. They do work from what I can tell although some features appear to be missing. And since they’re open source if anything needs fixed it will be fixed in the future.
Except Claude shat them out in record time which means they’re likely virtually unmaintainable.
And probably burned half of the Amazon forrest to do so. What the hell.
I mean, I’m kind of for it not as a surface level practical solution, but as a symbolic fighting back against the big guys.
Like, if AI is going to make the worker valueless why not use it to make the products of rent-seeking software giants useless as well?
I’ve been wondering when/if this thought process will gain more traction
