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/
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.