Look! Our Nepalese community is preparing a very cool LibreOffice event for early December. More details to come – stay tuned to this blog 😉
Author: Mike Saunders
LibreOffice 64-bit progress, and support for Amazon Linux 2023
LibreOffice has been available for Linux since we started the project in 2010. The official builds from The Document Foundation (the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice) are designed to be self-contained and distribution agnostic – that is, they should work on as many distributions as possible.
To achieve this, we test on various Linux distributions, and now we consider Amazon Linux 2023 as another platform supported by LibreOffice. Amazon has provided resources for regular and automated CI (continuous integration) testing of LibreOffice builds against Amazon Linux 2023, including crash-testing runs, via the AWS Open Source Credits programme.
As part of this, and for the general benefit of other users, TDF has started to provide 64-bit ARM Linux builds (aarch64) in RPM format. We’ve worked on improving 64-bit ARM support for various platforms in recent years, including for Windows and on Apple silicon Macs, given that the chips are becoming increasingly used in desktops and servers.
64-bit ARM chips commonly power cloud infrastructure, where LibreOffice is often used in headless (non-GUI) tasks, such as batch conversions of large numbers of documents. But some users run LibreOffice graphically too. With the updates we’ve been working on, LibreOffice is now available on more infrastructure and can be deployed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). If there’s anything else users would like to see, submit an enhancement request and let us know!
LibreOffice project and community recap: September 2025
Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…
- At the start of the month, the LibreOffice Conference 2025 took place in Budapest, Hungary. We had talks, workshops, fun social events and more. Thanks to all who attended 😊 See the schedule for information about the talks (and links to the slides, where available).
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- Also towards the start of September, we announced LibreOffice 25.2.6, the sixth minor update to the previous branch of the suite.
- LibreOffice’s documentation is available in many languages thanks to our worldwide community of translators. The Czech team announced their translation of the Calc Guide 25.2 – excellent work!
- The Annual Report of The Document Foundation describes the foundation’s activities and projects, especially in regard to LibreOffice and the Document Liberation Project. We’ve been posting sections of the 2024 report here on the blog, and now the full version is available.
- Companies around the world use LibreOffice to reduce costs, improve their privacy, and free themselves from dependence on single vendors. We talked to Flotte Karotte, a German company with 50 employees that recently made a generous donation to support the LibreOffice project and community.
- In other event news, planning took place for the Open Source Conference 2025 in Luxembourg and we provided an overview of the LibreOffice-related talks.
- We spoke to Devansh Varshney, who added histogram chart support to LibreOffice and is working on improvements to the Basic IDE.
- Next, our Nepalese community reported back on their Software Freedom Day 2025 event. They had a talk about the importance of open formats, and a fun game too.
- LibreOffice turned 15 years old in September! This is a milestone not only for the software itself, but also for the global movement that it represents.
- And finally, we wrapped up September with a report on the Austrian Military moving 16,000 PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.
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LibreOffice Podcast, Episode #5 – Accessibility in Free and Open Source Software
LibreOffice strives to be accessible for people with special needs or limitations, such as visual impairment or limited motor abilities. How does the software work towards this? What accessibility features are in the pipeline? And how can all users help out? We talk to Michael Weghorn about these topics – and more. (This episode is also available on PeerTube.)
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Austria’s military switches from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice
Like we’re seeing in Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark and many other government bodies and organisations, the Austrian military (Bundesheer) has migrated 16,000 PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.
As Heise reports, the main reasons behind the switch are to:
- strengthen digital sovereignty
- maintain independence of IT infrastructure
- ensure that data is processed in-house
The initial plan to move to LibreOffice was formed in 2020, and detailed planning and training of internal developers for improvements began in 2022. In 2023, a company in Germany was contracted to provide technical support and additional development.
The Austrian military’s migration reflects a growing demand for independence from single vendors. With free and open source software like LibreOffice, anyone can study and modify the source code to make improvements specifically for their setup and workflow. Government bodies and organisations can free themselves from vendor lock-in, spending taxpayer’s money on local companies to provide support and further development – rather than paying for license fees from overseas companies.
At the recent LibreOffice Conference 2025, representatives from the Austrian armed forces gave a talk about their switch from Microsoft Office, highlighting some of the new features and improvements that they have sponsored:
Click here to view the slides
LibreOffice and Software Freedom Day 2025 in Nepal
Updates from the Nepalese LibreOffice community:
Recent protests and stress in Nepal have disrupted regular activities. Almost everything was affected, including in-person events being canceled rapidly. For open source software users, Software Freedom Day 2025 was a big celebration. But many felt disillusioned about the event.
Despite all this, our community members in Nepal tuned in to an online call and turned Software Freedom Day 2025 into a success. Birendra Open Source Club – one of the student clubs and LibreOffice project contributors in Nepal, with support from Liaison Suraj Bhattarai and other key open source clubs, hopped onto Discord on 20 September. They carried out a series of talks among new and old enthusiasts and learners. The talks ranged from the importance of community and good first contributions, all the way up to open source in cybersecurity and open source pieces of hardware.
Suraj shared a short talk about Open Formats and added a little fun with the Easter hunt available on the LibreOffice Asia site.
Participants learned that a sense of freedom for software is only true when all the components, including formats or what we generally call “extensions,” share the same freedom as speech. It matters most in the case of canvas-based software and What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) software, where there are different options to export or save the work in progress.
He emphasized that open formats are essential to software freedom because they let free software and users interoperate without barriers. Also, he highlighted the difference between open formats and closed formats.
TDF says: thanks to the Nepalese community for all their work! Click here to see Suraj’s presentation slides.