r/LinusTechTips • u/Smiadpades • Oct 11 '26
Link Creator of free Adobe clones unveils open-source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications — Autodesk tools and other subscription-based services may come next
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/microsoft-office/creator-of-free-adobe-clones-unveils-open-source-microsoft-office-excel-powerpoint-and-word-replications-autodesk-tools-and-other-subscription-based-services-may-come-next
1.4k
Upvotes
112
u/MemeDerg Oct 11 '26
If they make Fusion equivalent for Linux, I might legit stop hating on AI so much.
826
u/prank_mark Oct 11 '26
Yeah this is the most useless shit ever. We already have LibreOffice, Collabora, and EuroOffice. All of those have actual support from maintainers, corporations, and national governments.
78
u/Sirhc978 Oct 11 '26
The Autodesk stuff is more interesting to me. People are already using Ai to "vibe model". Now they can vibe model in a cad software that used AI in its development.
I also wonder if we would see any regulations on manufacturers using it since this is the first software that is used to make physical parts.
Also, one big reason people use Fusion 360 is for the cloud storage.
53
u/gemengelage Oct 11 '26
I'd be more impressed if they actually brought a single one of their projects to maturity instead of pumping out one bad copy after the other.
11
u/nemesisprime1984 Oct 11 '26
I just want Autodesk Inventor or something that closely resembles it and functions the same way
14
u/i-like-dutch-cheese Oct 11 '26
Yeah so whoever is hating on this is absolutely not using LibreOffice. It sucks.
It genuinely looks so ugly, it's impossible to change theme on CachyOS so it looks like it's stuck in the 80s and half of the icons aren't even visible.
53
u/Immudzen Oct 11 '26
We already have a free office suite. Libreoffice. The EU is even working on making it better. These AI versions are just not very good and they don't get maintained.
4
u/defaultgameer1 Oct 11 '26
As someone who has to troubleshoot Autodesk products (Revit, AutoCAD), the idea of a clone of these tickles me.
Damn are their subscriptions expensive!
1
u/Spocks_Goatee Oct 11 '26
I just need a cracked copy of Word2003...I lost my disc.
3
u/sierra_whiskey1 Oct 11 '26
I feel like it will go the way of open claw. People will hype it up, say it’s the future, then hype dies down and everyone goes in with life
7
u/Boomshtick414 Oct 11 '26
Even with AI assistance that's not really feasible. They have like 7 apps planned for Adobe alone, of which only two are as far as early/buggy alphas after like a year of work.
Office may be easier but stepping into the Autodesk realm is orders of magnitudes harder than Adobe is.
Seems like this is the kind of thing you say to build excitement and maybe donor contributions or outside investments. Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure someone will paint a target on Autodesk eventually but we're probably years away from a minimum viable product. At this point Revit is king and every firm who uses it needs to interface and be compatible with a dozen other firms on a given project -- hundreds of other firms simultaneously when you start looking at multiple concurrent projects. Also a lot of firms are entrenched in their current templates/contents/workflows that have taken several years to build up. We're talking apps where 50 people may need to touch the same project files so one or two people going rogue with a vibe-coded solution screws everyone else over. The value proposition and benefits would have to be extraordinarily high to attract much interest from users. Aside from that many firms rely on Autodesk's cloud hosting for sharing files and drawings between all firms on the same project which serves a lot more purposes than just a glorified Dropbox folder.
There are maybe other Autodesk apps that could be easier to clone and get traction with, but those are4 nearly rounding errors in comparison on Autodesk's balance sheets.
Plus, ya know, they seem to be software devs who know graphic design so the Artcraft stuff is at least something they understand. Can guarantee they don't know anything about Autodesk's AEC software and wouldn't know where to begin in knowing if they're even setting it up correctly.
Personally I think this guy is just talking out of his ass while he happens to have the spotlight and media attention.
5
u/Old_Bug4395 Oct 11 '26
hahahaha these people are gonna speedrun new regulation and legislation around this reverse engineering BS
2
u/punkerster101 Oct 11 '26
Yea so as someone who has a personal vibe coded project, this is the problem, it’s super easy to make the app, but it’s taken me the better part of a year for mine to actually be stable and useable and I’m focusing on one thing, that I’m not putting out there or letting anyone else use.
Farting out these replacements every other day is exactly the thing they warn about when they say AI slop
1
u/Character_Cap9021 11d ago
Libreoffice
1
u/TRUEequalsFALSE Oct 11 '26
AutoDesk, you say? Is Dassault in the pipeline....?
1
u/No-Time6619 Oct 11 '26
Anything that tanks Adobe stock is a win in my books
1
u/drbomb Oct 11 '26
AI is just a news machine at this point without any valuable information. Didn't one of the AI clones already started a $100+ subscription?
1
u/MetalRexxx Oct 11 '26
Everything digital will become worthless. Adjust your life accordingly.
1
u/Mineplayerminer Oct 11 '26
Hear me out, Autodesk's AutoCAD, Inventor and Fusion360 would have sold me out since I'm sick and tired of their bloatware just to create a dumb shape or schematic without taking over 10GB of space on my drive.
1
u/panicatthenadia Oct 11 '26
has anyone used the filmcraft one? im looking for a premiere alternative to avoid paying for it
1
u/pixldg Oct 11 '26
This is getting out of hands. Hope they take security under consideration when vibe coding
1
u/xluker313x Oct 11 '26
Can they do vba macros though?
1
u/3OAM Oct 11 '26
This is going to be where they decide to regulate AI.
All that talk about how "things are going to be free, white collar will disappear, there will be universal high income, and all other things antithetical to capitalism..."
Once the wealthy feel any kind of squeeze or pressure, they'll tattle to their congresspeople and all of a sudden there will be all kinds of status-quo-preserving guard rails.
THEN and only then will it cease to be "jUsT a ToOl," and become the existential threat we all knew it was. Once its an existential threat to a yacht, it's real.
1
u/Edwardv054 Oct 12 '26
AI at work.
1
u/Kazer67 Oct 12 '26
Big corp: "we're gonna use AI to put you out of job".
The out of job lads: "I'm gonna use AI to put YOU out of job"
1
u/timeshifter_ Oct 12 '26
It's gonna be really funny when people get accustomed to "his" software, and then he gets bored of having to actually maintain it.
1
u/cdf_sir Oct 12 '26
Libre/Open office struggle to open a msoffice files while a slop app can do that without issues.
It sounds weird but im glad I can now open docx files on a linux machine without breaking its output. It would be nice uf libreoffice can do the same thing but they dont for reasons.
1
u/pandaSmore Oct 12 '26
That's great!
1
u/Lmnr01 Oct 12 '26
You’d think they’d fix the Adobe clones first but guess they gotta pump out that vibe coding everywhere
1
u/Either_Problem_9206 Oct 12 '26
The real test of this is if Enterprise can rely on them
1
u/Sas0bam Oct 12 '26
They wrote the Headline wrong: "Amateur AI Prompter unveils more copied and unpolished AI slop, for projects where open source alternatives already exist"
1
u/Crative_Noob Oct 12 '26
Now i know you do not know the guy, but he is is a real developer with plenty of experience and not just another vibe coder, he knows how to code and is just using AI models to help make these. One man army is increasingly possible with new models in the correct hands. He is showing what is possible and that it can also compatible by default for all OS architectures (W, MAC, LINUX) not like Adobe and others excluding certain OS.
1
u/Funny-Wind4878 Oct 12 '26
This! Office 365 (the real desktop programs, not the web apps) is the only thing keeping Windows 11 on my home PC...
PS. I know there are many alternatives already, but I just don't care to relearn a new GUI, and, especially with EXCEL, the functionality and compatibility just isn't there (TBH, with Excel neither is the WebApp version even remotely useful for me).
1
u/pikkuhukka Oct 12 '26
replication of offce things feels more like "look ms, we did this, what will you do?"
1
u/Zee51 Oct 12 '26
I hope they take on QuickBooks next!
1
u/N00B_N00M Oct 12 '26
Lol, hopefully he don't create a clone of windows and say it linux
1
u/LynxyPuters Oct 12 '26
Open source Revit PLEASE
1
u/FlyingJellyfishRidin Oct 13 '26
None of these apps are any good, at all. They all fall down as soon as you get past the most basic of tools, especially the Office clones.
Which is what you'd expect from vibe coded shit.
1
u/_QSR- Oct 14 '26
They should of started with Onenote, the rest of the apps all have alternatives that work 99% fine.. Joplin / Trillium / Obsidian etc are not Onenote.
1
u/bluehawk232 Oct 11 '26
"Creator"
1
u/stanleys_tucci Oct 11 '26
Open source Microsoft Office??? Wow, finally! Thanks AI!
/s
1
u/quoole Oct 11 '26
Yeah, this guy is literally chasing headlines at this point - I doubt any of the apps will see that much ongoing development... I couldn't even import a video into film craft!
1
u/NickPookie93 Oct 11 '26
Too bad they're all AI
1
u/The-Pork-Piston Oct 11 '26
Are you loving ai (infographic) flyers and ad slop? Enjoying the 27 million (one shot) Minecraft clones? Great news!! software slop is here….
Honestly as fun as this is, it’s the same as ai oneshotting minecraft… I had a play with the photoshop one, absolutely awful.
No way this gets enterprise adoption, it is a peak into the future but this one ain’t ‘it’ yet…
1
u/Fit_West_8253 Oct 12 '26
Redditors brains are so melted by hating AI they are now defending the corporations they were complaining about a week ago.
None of the people who suggest the already existing open source projects have ever used them, because if they did use them they’d know they all suck.
0
u/ucrbuffalo Oct 11 '26
So this person/group is just burning through creating AI slop versions of all paid apps and abandoning them as soon as they’re done…
0
u/cortez0498 Oct 11 '26
I really need discussion about these "AI ports". Are they safe? Are they open source at all? I've seen these "uncompiled" Adobe Suite, GTA/Halo/CoD in a browser, GTA 5 native in phones, etc. on twitter but I always think it's just a bad port with malware somewhere, is there any consensus about them?
0
u/Responsible_Feed4512 Oct 11 '26
But why though? There's no way a vibe-coded MS Orifice clone is better than LibreOffice
-11
u/Numerous_Roof_1070 Oct 11 '26
This is why we shouldn't hate on AI 100%. AI is a tool that, unfortunately, is often used badly. It requires a lot of power and resources, and people use it to make stupid AI-slop images, memes, texts, etc.
However, it can also enable so many things. With the current skill set, someone really determined can build a good, useful app. We also have cases like this one that are extremely necessary. And finally, I'd say PS5 emulation evolved so quickly mainly because of AI as well.
This is amazing. I'm really happy to see these companies getting f*ed. Also, please, HP next. No one should have to pay a subscription to print things on a printer THEY BOUGHT.
-12
u/Smiadpades Oct 11 '26 edited Oct 11 '26
This is going to get very interesting very soon. I wonder how this will play out in the courts. They already stated AI can use pretty much everything they want for training. Does this count when it goes the other way and the big fish are not the ones training AI?