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/
Tl;dr: use ODF if you want reliability even in MS Office.
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.
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.
I am genuinely so tempted to just write my resume in Markdown and make a PDF this time around.
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 well over a decade ago.
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.
Well, now I feel old.
I do feel like anyone who hasn’t had to write multiple-hundred-page technical documents in Framemaker on an HP-UX C100 workstation with a couple of hundred MB of RAM shouldn’t be allowed to complain about any modern office software.
And don’t get me started on “automating the secretarial pool for fun and profit with WordPerfect DOS macros.”
Kids today…
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,
Im just gonna leave a few Quotes here:
When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory.
William Gates, 1985
In 1894, Albert A. Michelson remarked that in physics there were no more fundamental discoveries to be made. Quoting Lord Kelvin, he continued, “An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.
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:
- simple text styling (titles, bold, indent, that stuff)
- reflow text (not pdf)
- carry it’s media and other dependencies
- can be edited and viewed with the digital equivalent of carboard and a pencil
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.
Because it’s a new extension and it hasn’t been implemented yet. Saved you the click.
…and they managed to make a while “article” about that simple info. That’s why I stopped consuming all that shit.
Thanks for summing it up mate.
I don’t mind the articles, what I mind is annoying though.
This is paragraph two where I reiterate that I am just annoyed by the actual annoying thing.
This is the third paragraph, where I reiterate that I don’t mind articles, again, then remind you that I am annoyed by something else.
This is the seventh paragraph, down at the bottom of the page, where I finally mention my real annoyance is that they don’t make their point until the bottom because they want to get you to read all the repetitive nonsense before hand.
This is the last paragraph, because I know you will scroll to the bottom looking for the true answer, and I need to hide it, like a reverse of the lead up.
And you know what’s sad? Your bitter sarcasm was fun, while all those “articles”, that get stretched to infinity, are not.
I’m no AI-fan, but this is where they shine: “sum this shit up into 1-2 sentences of actual info, remove useless filler”.
I miss RSS as news. Pure, simple, no nonsense.
