The Document Foundation's LibreOffice 26.8, released August 26th, surpassed 1 million installer downloads in its first week, excluding updates via Linux repositories, making it the suite's most downloaded release ever. The foundation followed up with a post explaining that it deliberately excludes generative AI by default, citing principles like user control, no data leaving the device, no telemetry, and no vendor lock-in, while still allowing community plugins for those who want AI features.
A user inspecting disk usage discovered that OpenAI's Codex desktop app, now rebranded as part of ChatGPT, stores a 1.7GB cache folder containing full Python and Node.js runtimes alongside native binaries for Poppler, git, and the LibreOffice office suite. Accompanying 'skills' files instruct Codex on how to locate and invoke these bundled tools when handling document-related tasks.
The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 26.8, bringing a set of Writer-focused enhancements. Key additions include automatic RTL text direction detection, a new baseline grid display option, fixed page line-spacing inside frames, and a new Paragraph Composer that balances word spacing across consecutive lines instead of using a simple greedy algorithm.
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