Are you still using Windows 7, 8, 8.1, or a 32 bit version of Windows, relying on LibreOffice for your sexy office tasks of writing TPS reports and calculating and tabulating juicy, plump numbers? Bad news: the next version of LibreOffice will remove support for these platforms. Buried deep in the release notes of the second beta for LibreOffice 25.8, it reads:
Support for Windows 7 and 8/8.1 was removed.
Support for x86 (32-bit) Windows builds is deprecated.
↫ LibreOffice 25.8 beta 2 release notes
I honestly doubt many people actually still rely on LibreOffice on these platforms, and even if for some unfathomable reason you do, you are probably also okay with sticking with an older version of LibreOffice to keep your weird setup going a few years longer. You do you.
Does anyone use Libreoffice for anything serious?
This isn’t a sarcastic question. I haven’t met anyone who does, but I’d really like to hear about the existence of any such person.
Me. I write my novels with it.
We use it at work because we can’t be bothered to buy an Office license for every workstation that just needs to print the occasional document or look up something on a spreadsheet. The owner and a couple of managers have Office licenses because they use full blown Outlook and its integrations with the rest of the Office suite, but the rest of us (myself included) do just fine with LibreOffice, and Thunderbird or webmail for email.
My significant other uses writer for all her word processing needs (both work and private).
I use it to convert text to docx.
Same — but in reverse.
I use LibreOffice to convert _anything from MS to plain-text or plain CSV … or PDF
cevvalkoala,
I’ve gotten away from microsoft and use Libreoffice for spreadsheets and documents. I’ll do a lot of documentation and it works just fine. I’m surprised you haven’t encountered any users because it’s been the top dog for linux users.
Compatibility is not perfect and I acknowledge this would matter for some, especially if you are expected to edit documents as a team with others who might complain about unintentional changes to the document. But for my needs it is good enough. I do have a job where I can’t use libreoffice because the client needs macros.
Ohh the linux folks I know (including yours truly whenever I am on mint) use google docs.
Based on the comments here, I guess the user base of libreoffice may be stronger in the west, and leaner in the developing world. Yeah, based on 6 comments 😛
Here’s an entire country’s government that is moving to it: https://www.thelocal.dk/20250610/why-denmark-wants-to-cut-use-of-microsoft-products-at-key-ministry
I know it’s still “the West” but it’s definitely East of us USians. 🙂
Got my college degree with OpenOffice and did grad school with LibreOffice. Have used them daily the past ~25 years in my company. Calc is a powerful tool, can do quite a few things in ways other spreadsheet programs can’t.
Main use of LibreOffice is preparing presentations. I would prefer to use OpenOffice 1.1, but keeping that 32-bit program running has become too difficult.
Secondary use is to read MS Office formatted files. However, the need to do so has declined dramatically over the years. Document exchange is mostly done using either Google docs or pdf files.
Manuscript preparation for submission to journals is done in Latex.
Yeah, it is really capable once you’ve made your mind around its “philosophy”.
Have a look at these documents to have an idea of what can be achieved (PDF version available) : https://github.com/Kochise/Formations/tree/master/BEPA%20mar%C3%A9chalerie
> Does anyone use Libreoffice for anything serious
I have used LibreOffice on Linux since the OpenOffice fork. As I prefer Linux as a desktop, I have used it as my primary word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program all of that time. In my family, the income that those documents have generated would be considered pretty “serious”.
I have seen several articles recently of European governments switching to LibreOffice. Presumably, those governments are doing serious things.
I can’t really use Microsoft Office on my Debian setup, unless I am going to spend time to run some older version that works through Wine. Aside from online Google Docs/Sheets, LibreOffice is the easiest office suite I can begin working in.
police in france use libreoffice, more than 500 000 installation…
https://code.gouv.fr/fr/bluehats/libreoffice-2023/
I use LibreOffice on Windows. I write the occasional document in Writer and I keep lots of data organized in Calc spreadsheets.
I don’t want to pay if I don’t have to, I don’t trust pirated software (so no Office), and I like to keep all my files local (so no browser-based editors). I also occasionally have to inspect CSV files for work, and LibreOffice gives me more power and control.
Killing 32bit is even more stupid than killing 7/8/8.1 support.
Open source was supposed tho protect users from corporations, now they back every decision taken in the button room, no matter if make sense or not.
What disgusting time we’re living now
It’s likely due to the maintenance burden. I’m sure you could find sufficient critical mass of users running 17+ year old PC’s but needing the latest bleeding edge libreoffice to fund a development team? /s
Open source was never about obligating people to do free development for a vanishingly small number of edge case users. It’s a licensing mechanism for source code sharing, not forced labour.
It’s an office suite. Maybe reserve your outrage about the state of the world for real issues.
that_guy,
The age of the PC isn’t really an issue. Unless there’s hand crafted assembly language, supporting older architectures is typically a straightforward recompile.
The problem with windows specifically though is that microsoft deliberately breaks the standard libraries, not because there is a real incompatibility, but because microsoft doesn’t want software running on older operating systems.. For example I do maintenance on proprietary business software from the 90s. It’s still using APIs that ought to run on win2k if a user really wanted to. However it’s not even compatible with windows 7 anymore because it was built under a new version of visual studio and microsoft intentionally breaks compatibility of libraries even when they should be compatible with the OS. It is intentional and this is how the majority of software becomes incompatible even when the software uses decades old APIs.
I agree with you in general. In products that I have managed, I have tried to maintain “support” as long as the software still works. Sometimes that meant not testing anymore but still being willing to fix bugs when they are reported. Sometimes it simply meant that we would not break things on purpose but could no longer guarantee that new development would not break on old platforms.
Having to actually create builds and test them for architectures with very few users is a burden. I can see why LibreOffice may not want to put in the work for < 4% of their user base. Work you put into maintaining builds for a small number of users is work that will not be spent making things better for the majority.
While many applications continue to rely on stable APIs that have been around forever, this is not always the case. I know that LibreOffice relies on the Skia graphics library for example. It would not surprise me at all if Skia requires new APIs and driver features not available on these older systems. LibreOffice cannot be expected to manage that. And as you say, their toolchain may have similar issues.
And sometimes, it is a liability question. For example, the cryptographic libraries on Windows 7 have problems at this point that are never going to be addressed. I can see not wanting to distribute binaries that have these problems (not sure if this impacts LibreOffice).
For me, the real questions is if LibreOffice will still accept patches that keep things working on these older platforms? If so, Open Source means you can keep things going as long as you want. This just means that the LibreOffice project itself has higher priorities. Fair enough I say.
LeFantome,
I am not familiar with the library. I see it supports windows 10+. I am curious if it’s actually incompatible with older operating systems because it doesn’t support their API, or if it’s just incompatible when built using microosoft’s latest build environments.
The crypto API is merely an abstraction, we use the same cryptographic APIs in windows windows 7, 10 and 11. In other words, while there could be new implementations, it doesn’t necessarily mean the software can’t be compatible across them.
I do get your point about running older versions of windows at your own risk. But if we’re being totally honest even current “supported” versions of windows are at our own risk too. 1) microsoft’s OEM “warranty” is surprisingly only valid for 90 days and 2) microsoft disclaims suitability for any specific purpose.
https://www.microsoft.com/content/dam/microsoft/usetm/documents/windows/11/oem-(pre-installed)/UseTerms_OEM_Windows_11_English.pdf
That crypto comes with zero guarantees and Microsoft’s remedy is basically a refund.
I still feel this focuses on the wrong party though. It’s usually not the application source code itself that is incompatible but that binaries are linked against microsoft dependencies that deliberately break backwards compatibility at predictable intervals.
@Alfman
Don’t get me wrong. I am quite happy to blame Microsoft. Your point is going to be correct more times than not.
In this case, the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 2015-2022 (v14.3x) that LibreOffice uses does support back to Windows 8, even 32 bit, and even Windows 7 (though MS “does not recommend it”). However, only on x86 and not ARM.
Perhaps LibreOffice is trying to sync their Windows support across platforms. Though if Skia is Windows 10+ only, that may be the issue. Skia is the Google 2D graphics library. It uses stuff like DirectWrite, Direct Composition, and probably features from WDDM2+.
LeFantome,
I’m not able to check right now, but do you know which version LibreOffice 25.8 actually uses?
According to this link…
https://www.itechtics.com/microsoft-visual-c-redistributable-versions-direct-download-links/
Switching to VC 2022 runtime corresponds to the dropping of windows 7/8, which is what I observed with our software too.
It would take more digging to find out the reason behind Skia and LibreOffice dropping support for windows 7/8. Granted it would be academically interesting if the reason is something other than a visual studio upgrade. Let me know if you find something. But my guess is still that a visual studio upgrade is responsible rather than software using windows 10+ only functionality.
@Alfman
They certainly are probably going to move to the 2022 MS runtime I would think. It seems like there are perhaps a cascade of reasons here. For example, I see that LibreOffice 25.8 requires (or maybe even ships with on Windows) Python 3.11 which itself only supports Windows 10 and up (at least officially).
Skia really does use newer APIs though and it is totally understandable that it would. Google could no doubt create fallbacks for older versions but that is not really their style and I cannot really fault them. Many, many projects use Skia but Google mostly creates it for themselves.
LeFantome,
Yes, it doesn’t surprise me at all that more dependencies are requiring windows 10+ given that developers upgrade their MS build tools. But in fairness I don’t think it dismisses the point that all of these projects are collectively being made incompatible merely because they’re upgrading microsoft’s dev tools and not so much because they’ve meaningfully changed the source code to require windows 10+. I feel these deliberate breakages by microsoft tend to be the biggest reason windows software becomes incompatible.
Hmm, your response doesn’t provide the evidence I was hoping for. Do you actually know that the source has a hard dependency on windows 10+, or are you just assuming it? I am genuinely curious here. Working for a commercial software company, we do the same thing, “we require windows 10 for the latest features, blah blah blah”, but as a developer working on said software I know it to be factually untrue. Ideally, with an open source project, we’d be able to point to a specific windows 10 call and provide a direct answer “this right here is why we cannot support windows 7/8”. Don’t you agree right now this seems to be missing from the discussion?
With this in mind, I think we should refrain from saying that lack of maintenance is the cause of the compatibility problem. I really am curious about specific exceptions though, which is why I was trying to probe whether you could identify a specifically case that isn’t the result of merely upgrading the MS compiler suite. It’s only the specifics and not the handwaiving that interest me, but I am not sure if we’ll be able to come up with anything specific.
LibreOffice developer here. As Alfman said – the usual need to drop certain support is because we want to up the minimum required baseline for runtimes, build tools and compilers (because we want to use new C++ features and standard library functions to make our life easy or some library upped their requirements and we have to do it too or we would be stuck with an old version) and those drop support at certain times.
Skia is currently not a problem AFAIK but Pdfium for example uses features from C++20, which are not currently available in the baseline, so we are stuck with an older version currently.
Quikee,
Hey what are the odds. I always find it interesting to learn who else is on these forums 🙂
I have many feature requests…but it would be impolite of me to throw them at you here, haha.
I’m reading OSNews for a long time, but I commented a couple of times only. This time it was about LibreOffice so I had to comment 🙂
You can file feature requests in LibreOffice Bugzilla, but it will be hard to convince the QA and UX people that triage bugs that your features should be the one to implement. In the past we were more lenient but then all the feature request just piled up and rarely any were actually implemented after many years. Of course if you want to implement it yourself it’s a different story. 🙂
I’m curious now what feature requests you had in mind…
Come on! Don’t keep parroting that pointless argument.
In windows x64 means having everything bigger (rougly) by a 1.6 factor.
1.6x larger ISOs, VHDs, RAM usage and so on.
Which means that in a virtualized environment a VDI server that serve say 40 x64 clients, needs to waste a large amount RAM storage, backup time, network transfer time. and ENERGY
To put it differently the same server could serve 60 32 bit machines.
This has nothing to do with 17 YO PCs..
Perhaps except for specialized tasks like CPU based video transcoding, or math simulation, a 32bit OS is usually faster than its 64bit cousin, in the worst case it’s on par.
We are wasting resources, in the broadest sense, for literally no reason,
No reason other than keeping the wheel of capitalism running.
@the solutor
I completely agree with you, even on the desktop.
I can run a 32 bit OS in a VM of course and often do.
I can run a 32 bit OCI container in Docker or Podman.
But I struggle to launch a 32 bit image in Distrobox. If I could do that, it would likely be my standard workflow for most apps.
Last year *simple mobile tools* for android got acquired by an ad-malware company. The whole suit got forked into *fossify* and is doing quite well nowadays. **That** is the protection open source affords.
Feel free to do organise something similar for a libreoffice 32bit fork after their evil corporate decision.
I am pretty sure that if you step up to maintain support for legacy code bases and legacy architectures, then they’ll even support Windows 95. However you’ll be the one responsible for providing compatibility code which doesn’t even compile on ancient compilers, preferably as another branch, which is regularly updated with legacy support.
Fortunately 32bit chips are dying. Modern ARM chips don’t even support AArch32 state, which means you can’t run code from crappy old Cortex A15. RISCV64 APs is probably 64bit only and will not execute RV32 code. x86 emulation is probably maintained only to support legacy code bases, but I suspect it will be dropped in the future, as CPUs are perfectly capable of JIT in reasonable time, if someone really wants to run code from 30 years ago.
None of those Windows operating systems are supported by Microsoft anymore. None of them have many users.
As for 32 bit support, what percentage of Windows users on Windows 10 and higher are 32 bit do you think? I mean, most of the web browsers went 64 bit only long ago. That includes Electron apps.
A quick Google tells me that fewer than 5% of Windows users run 32 bit systems. I cannot confirm that but it sounds about right.
How many of that 5% are trying to download LibreOffice? This seems like a smart decision by the LibreOffice team.
That’s just false.
Win10 32bit will probably be supported until mid 30’s
Win7/8.1 stiill have updates via ESU and probably the situation will not change for another handful of years.
About 5%, assuming the figure is true is still twice the Linux percentage.
So not a single of your argument holds.
Well, since we are leading with “That’s just false” and ending with “not a single of your argument holds”…
> Win7/8.1 stiill have updates via ESU
Windows 8.1 never had an ESU program. The one for Windows 7 ended over 2 years ago. Even the Windows 10 one only goes until 2028.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/extended-security-updates
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/windows-7-eos-faq/windows-7-extended-security-updates-faq
> About 5%, assuming the figure is true is still twice the Linux percentage.
LibreOffice has about 30 million downloads a year. About 7.5 million of those are Linux. Since, I think without debate, most Linux users get their software from repos and are not counted in this number, I think it is conservative to say there are 15 million Linux users of LibreOffice.
About 20 million of the LibreOffice downloads are for Windows. If we NOW apply the 5% estimate as to how many of these use 32 bit, we get 1 million 32 bit Windows users of LibreOffice.
So, there are 15 Linux users of LibreOffice for every 32 bit Windows user and probably fewer than 3% of LibreOffice users are using 32 bit Windows.
Most software would have different relative share of course but LibreOffice is not unique in this way either. Firefox may be even more extreme in terms of its popularity with Linux users than Windows users.
> So not a single of your argument holds.
That is just false.
My intuition says it is probably far lower than 3% actually as the kind of person still using 32 bit Windows is almost certainly still using their old copy of Microsoft Office on it as well. But these numbers are very hard to find.
It’s matter of theory V.S. pratice
The ESU updates are there, and they are usable in W7/W8/W8.1
Win 10 (1809) and 2*H* will be supported until 2029 /2030 NOT 2028, then there will be ESU, that will last another 3 years at the bare minimum, but likely will extend for another decade or more, just like is happening NOW for win7/8/8.1
I haven’t yet updated my Win7 to June 2025, but May’s update brings the kernel to v 6.1.7601.27717 (built 17 April 2025 ) not bad for something that doesn’t exist 🙂
Ah, forgot to mention that also Vista has still updates, and unlike for 7-8.1, they are still available also in the 32bit flavor
The last 32-bit only Intel CPUs were the Northwood P4, Dothan Pentium M and some early Atoms, and you don’t want to run (running is a strong word for that kind of performance) LibreOffice on these chips.
First gen core duo as well..
If you use an older version of Visual C your programs can run on any version of Windows from 95 to 11.
A lot of open source software has supported timeframes not really any better than proprietary software, as this example shows. Not sure how they expect to grow their userbase if they keep removing platform support.
Well, as per my debate with someone else on this post, there is not much userbase to grow into on these older platforms. Putting the same amount of development, testing, and project management effort into improving LIbreOffice for those on newer platforms will probably grow the userbase more.
But the beauty of Open Source vs proprietary is that, just because LibreOffice stops building new versions for older platforms, that does not mean that users on these platforms cannot continue to use LibreOffice or even continue to discover and migrate to it. The older versions will continue to be available. The source code will continue to be available if anybody wants to fix bugs or patch security issues. Of course, if you are using these older platforms, LibreOffice is unlikely to be your biggest security risk and you are probably taking other steps (like not being connected to the Internet).
“If you use an older version of Visual C your programs can run on any version of Windows from 95 to 11.”
Windows 95 support means we would be limited to Visual C++ 2005 with C++03 support and we wouldn’t be able to use anything added in the standard library since. Also we could not build any libraries that require newer C++ version, or C version.
Sorry, it’s not that simple to just use an “old version of Visual C”.
Quikee,
I suspect other incompatibilities would abound, but using another compiler like cygwin or mingw might be a way around this? Cygwin tries to recreate unix on windows, whereas mingw is more like a native windows compiler. Personally I like mingw over cygwin. Years ago I was doing windows kernel development under mingw. Fun times 🙂
In theory a compiler that supports modern dialects could still allow us to call into older windows libraries. It needs to be tested, but I don’t believe GNU based compilers would be dependent on microsoft’s libraries to provide modern language features on older versions of windows.
I don’t have a need to do any of this, just food for thought.
True, this is a possibility and I’m sure we had considered this in the past (if you look at Mingw-w64 you see that LibreOffice is listed as a project using it), but this would require work to do and I think most people would rather spend the time working on other things than fighting the build system.
Of course if some avid Windows 7 user would step up and implement this we would consider it (if there also were no drawbacks with this approach).
We do use cygwin for building on Windows because of the build system in LibreOffice (we are trying to get WSL working), but the compiler we use is MSVC (cl.exe).
Quikee,
Agreed. IMHO supporting older operating systems would be more of a secondary benefit than a primary goal. A more interesting reason to switch compilers might be to improve performance though.
Although it’s surprisingly difficult to find benchmarks thoroughly comparing MSVC and MINGW, which would help make the case it’s worth doing or not. While not thorough, I did find some published data points for random applications:
http://dev.opencascade.org/content/mingw-w64-vs-msvc
stackoverflow.com/questions/76825015/cython-execution-speed-vs-msvc-and-gcc-versions
stackoverflow.com/questions/73386042/msvc-compiled-program-is-3x-slower-than-program-compiled-with-mingw
(Sorry I have to break links so wordpress doesn’t auto-moderate my post)
Since many users tend not to aspire to be a cog in the wheel of forced Microsoft updates, I see that LibreOffice’s removal of support for legacy WIndows in newer releases disheartening. I personally do not intend to update to WIndows 11 because of the forced inclusion of Ai and the consequences of my personal data being mined for LLM purposes, or some other hidden agenda. I wonder is OpenOffice will also drop support for legacy WIndows.
I hate seeing old platforms lose support as well. Part of me wishes I could still run Windows 2000. So I feel odd arguing on behalf of LibreOffice here.
However, we have to acknowledge that these are ancient platforms in Windows terms. The newest of them (Windows 8.1) came out 12 years ago. Windows 7 came out over 15 years ago.
Let’s look at the Linux support. Even the current version of LibreOffice requires kernel 4.18 for example. That means Ubuntu 18.10 or Fedora 28. Those came out 7 years ago. So, they have been hanging on to older versions of Windows far longer.
The last release of Windows 10 (not support–new release) was in October, 2022. LibreOffice may support that beyond 2035. Even Microsoft may have fully shifted to Linux by then. Or perhaps ReactOS may be usable.
This is a real blow to all the ReactOS users!
ReactOS team is actively working on adding support for software running on more modern Windows version, and there’s ongoing effort to make 64-bit version of ReactOS to be on the same state of stability as 32-bit version (yeah, I know it sounds funny, but ReactOS is currently much more stable nowadays, at least in a virtual machine).
So I guess, running modern LibreOffice is possible in maybe like… 5 years?
Well, I was joking.
However, I agree that, now that they finally got 0.4.15 out the door, ReactOS has become a lot more impressive. Hopefully they get more attention and move faster.
There is a 64 bit port but they lack Wow64 (and will for a long time I expect). Couple with the fact that they are still targeting Windows Server 2003 APIs and you have an OS that can run the 64 bit applications that target Windows XP 64. So, about a dozen apps.
For the 64 bit port, they need to target API compatibility with something much more recent (like Windows 10). That would pave the way to modern web browsers running on it at least, as well as things like LibreOffice of course. I am not saying they need to support every API. Rather, make sure they have the APIs and API versions to support some of the most in demand software (eg. browsers and office suites). The kernel could still be mostly the Windows Server 2003 design although they really need SMP support as well.
If they had that, ReactOS could really be an option for some.
I think both SMP and AMD64 support is already present in some experimental builds
Ya, a real blow to those 3 users.