What TDF actually reported
The headline figure is 9.4 million downloads between August 24 and October 18. Three details sit around it.
- Release timing. TDF announced LibreOffice 26.8 on August 26, 2026, for Windows, macOS and Linux. The counting window therefore opens two days before the release announcement. TDF says that before the announcement, weekly downloads were under one million but fairly close to it.
- First-week record. In a September 2 post, TDF reported 1,031,162 downloads in the first week, the highest first-week total of any LibreOffice release.
- Year-over-year claim. TDF says 2026 downloads have grown sharply compared with 2025. The total for all of 2025 has already been passed, with 10 weeks still to go. TDF gave no exact totals for either year in this announcement. An outside comparison site, OpenAlternative, puts 2025 at 44.8 million downloads from LibreOffice's own site. That is a third-party figure, not a TDF number from this announcement, so treat it as a rough yardstick.
What the number does not include
TDF is open about the limits. The 9.4 million figure leaves out two things:
- Updates to the Windows version, which TDF counts separately.
- Downloads of older LibreOffice versions, which TDF says remain fairly high.
TDF also published website-visit figures from Matomo for the same eight weeks:
| Site | Visits |
|---|---|
| Main downloads site | 11,426,169 |
| Updates site | 90,042,601 |
| Older versions site | 39,669,854 |
Visits are not downloads. TDF says these figures are reliable but not precise to the nearest unit, because a visit does not necessarily result in a download, particularly for updates and older versions. You shouldn't add them to the 9.4 million. Nor should you read the 90 million update visits as 90 million people using Windows LibreOffice. TDF offers a ZIP of three CSV files with the country-level origin of the visits for anyone who wants to dig in.
There is a coverage gap too. TDF has said its first-week numbers cover only the official download page. Many Linux users will have acquired the release through their distribution's package repositories. The announcement doesn't say whether that caveat carries over to the eight-week total, but official-site counts are clearly not the whole delivery picture. The same goes for managed deployments. Package managers, software-distribution tools and store installs can all bypass the website.
Why it's growing: TDF doesn't know
The foundation admits it can't explain the growth from its data. Downloads are free and completely anonymous. TDF's own guess is that the project's consistency matters. It points to years of championing digital sovereignty and standard document formats, and to software that doesn't try to clone the market-leading suite.
That is TDF's interpretation, not a measured cause. A few other factors are plausible, and this is my own industry reasoning rather than anything TDF reported:
- The "no AI" positioning. The 26.8 announcement states plainly that the suite contains no generative AI features and requires no network access to function. Manual do Usuário bet that this "non-feature" drove interest. TDF followed up with a post saying it does not reject AI out of hand, but that the technology doesn't yet meet its principles for inclusion by default. Nothing in the download data can confirm or refute that theory.
- Release-cycle effects. Major releases naturally bring spikes.
- Measurement noise. Some Hacker News commenters argued the 26.8 peak sits within normal week-to-week variation. That is community commentary, not an authoritative finding. TDF's own statement that weekly numbers have stayed above one million after the release is the more careful claim.
What it means for Windows admins and users
Downloads aren't market share. LibreOffice stays far smaller than Microsoft 365 in managed enterprise settings. TDF's numbers can't show active users, organizational adoption, or how many downloads came from Windows machines. The operating-system split isn't published in the announcement.
Still, a steady million-plus weekly downloads is a sign of sustained interest. A few practical points follow for people evaluating or deploying it:
- Pick the right branch. TDF suggests production environments may prefer the 26.2 line, with LibreOffice 26.2.5 available from the download page at launch. That branch's end of life is November 30, 2026. Plan accordingly.
- Know about the 26.8 behavior changes. Per TDF's announcement, the Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts are no longer bundled, so documents specifying them will substitute another typeface. New documents default to start alignment rather than left alignment, and Safe Mode is now called Troubleshoot Mode.
- Test OOXML round-tripping. 26.8 preserves newer Microsoft chart types such as waterfall, treemap and funnel when saving, but can't yet render or edit them. For mixed Office/LibreOffice workflows, that matters.
- Expect a donation banner. 26.8 is the first release to show a donation prompt in the Start Center, shown periodically, not on every launch. TDF says there is no advertising, telemetry or subscription.
- Enterprise support. TDF points large deployments to ecosystem companies offering SLAs and security updates maintained for three to five years.
Bottom line
The verified part is simple. TDF recorded 9.4 million downloads from its official site over eight weeks, after a record first week for 26.8. It also says 2026 has already passed the full 2025 total. The rest is context: the update and older-version traffic is visits, not downloads, the Linux repository channel isn't counted, and the "why" is TDF's hypothesis. It's a healthy sign for LibreOffice, but not a measure of who is actually using it.