Your daily dose of “fuck Microsoft” is here!
The Document Foundation (TDF) recently announced the release of LibreOffice 26.8, and while it packs many new features, its highlight is the lack of any AI integration. This is quite the opposite of what Microsoft has been doing with its Office suite, but the tale of the disagreements between these two entities is as old as time itself, so nothing surprising. Now, TDF has explained why it cannot display some fancy charts that Microsoft Office can visualize without a problem.
Also explained at LO’s blog, with a less of a clickbait title: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/17/libreoffice-26-8-and-interoperability/
All I want to do is write a simple document. Many people have already written plenty of software to do just that … I don’t need it to do anything else.
Any company that wants to engineer anything else beyond that is just trying to justify to everyone why they would want to install a 90hp outboard motor on a little goldfish.
I am genuinely so tempted to just write my resume in Markdown and make a PDF this time around.
The problem is one person wants a complex feature here, another person needs another complex feature there. When you edit book-length texts you need styles, regular expressions in find/replace, plugins for referencing software etc. Interestingly, Word may do bells and whistles, but LO does the first two better than Word, and the third one as well as Word.
I use Markdown a lot for the plain text advantages but to me a huge limitation is that it doesn’t do colours and tabs. There are of course people writing books in Markdown, but I find it very limiting and ultimately counterproductive even for note-taking.
This is the whole overarching problem with tech. Most of us have fairly simple problems with fairly simple solutions, and tech has just straight up solved those needs, sometimes well over a decade ago.
I’m not saying there’s nowhere left for tech to improve, especially in the medical and biotech space, but in the consumer market there’s only so much we realistically need. It has been addressed, end of sentence, but capitalism’s need to extract infinite profit does not jive with solved problems.
Sometimes before I was born, that’d be 3 decades ago.
Networked collaborative office applications were a thing before 1995, BTW. Networks were not quite up to the task, but the rest was there.
Famous things like Word, Photoshop, AutoCAD and even raytracers were already feature-complete (by the computing ability of that time).
The Web (not the current one, but the hand-edited HTML pages by amateurs, Perl scripts as CGI, web rings and directories one) was the main new revolutionary thing in those, as you might have noticed, it’s also the very thing they are trying to destroy from all angles.
The overarching problem is that people who want you to buy things you don’t need and not buy things you need from someone else and not tell them to go to hell are able to push regulations and standards in their favor. They are joined by power-hungry people in governments in that.
All that is tangential to personal computers. A personal computer is a very powerful concept, especially with the Web (as it existed), and there are people trying to dilute and disperse and destroy that.
It’s all similar to printing press, mass media, widespread literacy, freedom of speech, all these things. A very important thing to protect.
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Im just gonna leave a few Quotes here:
Saying that IT (or most big industry in general) has nothing left to do except for selling stupid stuff, just because capitalism requires it is straight up delusional.
Sadly, there’s still no rtf alternative.
My requirements:
Office formats are over the top, require a fat office suite. epub is a website, even worse. Lightweight Markup formats like Markdown, Asciidoc, can’t carry their media. A html with base64 media comes the closest, sadly.
LaTeX is something I’ve been meaning to explore.