This Dev Built an Office Suite Because His Wife Kept Going Back to Microsoft Office

Gaël Duval has already put out two beta releases of ElixirOffice, a desktop app and a self-hosted server version, and he is asking early testers for feedback.

His wife, a teacher, has been facing a predicament many people usually face when using open source office suites. For her, the editors offered at school felt unfamiliar, the menu items and shortcuts felt out of place, and not to mention colleagues' documents also looked off.

ElixirOffice follows the Microsoft Office-style ribbon, menus, and shortcuts, and it opens OOXML document formats as well as their OpenDocument counterparts. It targets Linux, Windows, and macOS, with a server version aimed at teams.

This is what's in the beta

Both of those versions use the AGPL-3.0 license, where the desktop app works offline, while the server version runs through Docker on a machine you host.

ElixirOffice offers substitutes for the usual Microsoft Office apps. The document editor takes the place of Word, the spreadsheet editor of Excel, and the presentation editor of PowerPoint.

Each one opens the Microsoft format and its OpenDocument equivalent, so .docx and .odt files go to the document editor, .xlsx and .ods to the spreadsheet editor, and .pptx and .odp to the presentation editor.

The server version also lets you connect Murena Workspace and Nextcloud accounts through an optional start page, which stays disabled unless you switch it on, and the desktop editor has no support for accounts, mail merge, co-editing, version history, or password-protected files.

On Linux, the desktop beta comes as an AppImage and a DEB for Debian and Ubuntu, whereas Windows gets an installer and macOS a disk image for Apple Silicon devices only.

ElixirOffice

How did this come about?

Gaël started and supervised the project, while large language models handled the coding via AI agents, with tests and reviews being run on every change. ElixirOffice also has optional AI features that stay off until you connect a model of your own.

To keep layouts close to Word without Microsoft fonts, it ships free metric-compatible ones, plus Marelle, a font commissioned by the French Ministry of Education. The README file on the project's repo also claims that no telemetry is collected and sent.

Its roots

ElixirOffice is not written from scratch. It sits on top of Euro-Office, which itself comes from ONLYOFFICE, and the project's changes live inside the forks of the Euro-Office components.

The original copyright notices and license files are kept in place, and the project states that it is not affiliated with Ascensio System, the company behind ONLYOFFICE, or the Euro-Office project.

To provide you with some context, Euro-Office is an editor that European companies, led by Nextcloud and IONOS, are building to run inside other platforms. It launched on March 27, 2026, and shipped its first stable release on June 9.

Around that time, ONLYOFFICE had raised licensing and attribution concerns about Euro-Office and suspended its partnership with Nextcloud, which disputed the claims.

Who's Gaël Duval?

Gaël is best known as the creator of Mandrake Linux, a distro that later became Mandriva. He left the company in 2006 and went on to start Ulteo.

Later, he began work on eelo, which is now called /e/OS. It is a de-Googled, Android-based mobile OS from the nonprofit e Foundation, where Gaël is listed among the founding board members.

He is also the CEO of Murena, the company that sells phones running /e/OS and runs the Murena Workspace cloud service, which was previously called eCloud.

Could it end up in Murena Workspace?

Nothing in the project's documents or Gaël's announcement says Murena plans to offer ElixirOffice as part of Murena Workspace, so any such move can only be called speculation at this point.

The server version connecting to Murena Workspace accounts is a promising sign, but that doesn't really mean anything right now.

Back in 2022, ONLYOFFICE said that Murena Cloud used its editors, and the e Foundation's landing page for the service says Murena Workspace is powered by ONLYOFFICE too.

So my thinking is that, if ElixirOffice does mature to the level of ONLYOFFICE, there's not much stopping it from being adopted as the in-house base for Murena Workspace.

For now, the source code and the releases for ElixirOffice can both be found on GitHub. 👇

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Suggested Read 📖: Seeing that we are on the topic, ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0 is out now with many upgrades.

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Linux Mint 23 is No More. A New Release Takes its Place

In the project's September monthly update, Linux Mint lead, Clement Lefebvre (clem), says that the distro's version number now reflects the upcoming year and that point releases aren't a thing anymore.

Releases will come once a year, so 28 follows this one, and users upgrade from the current year's to the next. This ought to make it simpler for the many beginners who use Linux Mint as a gateway to the Linux platform.

The codenames change too, as the girls' names Mint has used since 2006 give way to boys' names. Linux Mint 27 "Adrien" is the first release to follow these new conventions, though it did not start off that way.

Where did LM 23 go?

You see, the devs had no name or version number ready for the next release when work on it began earlier this year, so they picked temporary ones. This way, "Alfa" became the codename and "23" the version.

That was because the release strategy was unclear. The cycle length, the handling of minor releases, and the question of alpha releases were all undecided, and the strategy would also dictate how releases got numbered and named.

It all goes back to the January update, when Clem said shipping a new release twice a year while also looking after LMDE was leaving them with less time to actually build features.

By March, the team had locked in a longer development cycle and a Christmas 2026 target for the next release. The move we have been talking about so far marks the end of that long decision-making process.

Clem also points out that using the girls' names for releases all these years, from Ada to Zena, had made them run out of alphabet just as the schedule changed, which he found a funny coincidence.

He says the project has never spent a full year on one release before, and while the move away from six-month cycles was a tough decision, it is working out.

A year of development

The longer cycle gives the team room to attempt projects that would once have felt out of reach. The Clockenstein project, which gave Mint a calendar app in the August update, now has an alarm app called Clocks too.

Alerts from Clocks run through the Clockenstein daemon and agent that already handle the calendar's notifications, so they go off even with the app shut. It handles repeating alarms and lets you pick your own sounds, while its look and behavior are borrowed from Android.

Three more projects, Superlight, Unfold, and Velocitty, are also getting their finishing touches. The next update blog will feature them.

If you need a refresher of the development work carried out so far, then you can read about Linux Mint's kernel removal feature and how Wayland support has been achieved.

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This Rust File Manager Was Designed for Omarchy, but Arch Users Can Run it Too

A file manager is one of the most basic tools a Linux distribution comes with, and desktop environments ship their own, such as Nautilus on GNOME, Dolphin on KDE Plasma, and Nemo on Cinnamon.

It is where people browse folders, move and rename files, preview what is inside them, and clean up any cluttered directories. Thanks to the platform's openness, you can also install more than one file manager on your system and use whichever you prefer.

A new one that has made an appearance recently is Strata, which is tailored for Omarchy and, to some extent, Arch Linux. Other glibc-based distributions might be able to run it, provided they meet its library requirements.

This file manager is written in Rust with GTK4 and released under the MIT license, with its lead developer, Pierre, announcing its first stable release a few hours ago. He claims that in 45 days, the project has picked up over 30 contributors and 700+ commits, with ~300K lines of Rust now in the codebase.

Strata is Here

Sourced from Strata's Git repo.

It can show folders side by side, so opening one reveals its contents in a new pane to the right while its parents stay visible, like the column view in macOS Finder. Icon and list views are available too, and being a keyboard-first app, it supports navigation with the arrow keys or the vi-style h, j, k, and l keys.

Ctrl+K opens a fuzzy search over your Home folder and every mounted local drive, which matches file names and paths but not file contents. The 1.0 release adds exclusions in Settings for skipping folders like node_modules or a single directory.

Tabs are another new addition that let any folder be opened in a new tab, with keyboard support for switching/reordering them, and previously open tabs being restored after a restart.

Strata also stores sort order and icon size per folder, where one folder can be sorted by date with large icons while another stays alphabetical with small ones, and each opens that way the next time.

Pressing Space toggles a preview panel for images, camera RAW files, PDFs, source code, audio, and video.

It includes a diverse range of themes too, and an in-app editor lets you create your own and save them as TOML files. Code and config files also get language-specific icons based on Catppuccin, in brand colors or the theme's accent.

Install it

Strata has an interactive installer for Omarchy and Arch Linux that runs from a single cURL command:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lgse/strata/main/install.sh | bash

The installer detects the CPU architecture, the glibc version, and whether the system runs Omarchy 3 or 4 or Arch Linux. It installs the latest stable release for the current user in ~/.local/bin.

Optional extras such as a desktop entry, a default folder handler, SMB support, and Omarchy keybindings are also available. You can even feed Omarchy's onboard AI agent a specific prompt to get it installed on your computer.

If you just want to check out Strata before committing to it, the project's homepage has a demo that lets you play around with it. Building from source is also possible.

Strata

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This New Distro Wants to Achieve What Ubuntu Failed to Do Nearly a Decade Ago

Remember Ubuntu’s convergence dream? One operating system across your desktop, tablet, and phone, with apps that adapt to whichever screen you’re using.

Canonical pursued that vision with Unity 8 and Ubuntu Phone before pulling its investment in 2017. Now, a new project called Luma wants to tackle a similar ambition.

It’s early days, and only a desktop build is available to download. But its plans go well beyond becoming another desktop Linux distro.

The project's founder, Nick (nmcmil), has worked with a small group of people to achieve this, with the group answering to no shareholders or investors and taking all the key project-related decisions themselves.

When I tested it, it was built on Fedora 44 and ran a recent version of the Linux kernel. The team does say that they have reworked enough of the stack that it doesn't count as a typical distro.

Their blog on AI also points out that the distro features AI-assisted contributions, with contributors being held responsible for any work that carries their name.

🚧

This distro is still pre-release and should not be treated stable enough for daily use or production deployments.

Luma: Overview ⭐

The desktop is called Prairie, and the team describes it as a hard fork of GNOME. Its goal is to provide a shell, windows, fonts, and apps that all look and feel the same.

Apps are built with GTK and Libadwaita, with the project shipping LumaUI as a toolkit outside developers can use to make their software feel at home on the system. Luma’s original code is licensed under Apache 2.0, and anything taken from upstream retains its original license.

The distro comes with pre-installed apps built for it; these include Depot as the app store, Viola as the browser, Charlie as the email client, and Tide for any music needs, alongside the self-explanatory Filer, Notes, Photos, and Messages.

If you opt for the Creative Collection, you get access to Canvas for design, Focus for RAW photo editing, Grid for spreadsheets, Stage for slides, Write for documents, Reel for video edits, and Sessions for audio mixing.

You also get Ari, the built-in AI assistant that's meant to work with local models, so everything can stay on your own hardware.

Package support is covered too. I installed apps through DNF5, Flatpak, and Snap on the October 11 nightly, and all three worked.

Valet takes care of AppImage, DEB, EXE, and APK files, which is how Windows and Android apps are meant to sit alongside native ones. It also tells you who made an app and what it can access before you install it.

Android support comes from an optional subsystem based on Waydroid, and compatibility varies by app. Luma is meant to be one system across desktop, tablet, and phone, so apps adjust their layout and controls to the screen size and to touch or mouse input.

There's also the optional Luma Connect app that handles sync for apps, settings, and files across devices.

For Smartphones Too!

Luma also wants to be your smartphone's OS. The team names the Fairphone 6 and the Google Pixel 9 family as its targets and says it plans to support more phones and tablets.

With what I can see from the screenshots they shared with us, the interface looks like it's on par with modern Android and iOS offerings, while sticking to a very measured approach for the colors and elements it employs.

The Luma folks are directing people to their hub's bounty board to vote for the devices they want and pledge money towards getting them supported.

Test it Now

Luma's clean installation experience.

Luma's download page lists a single 7.2 GB x86_64 nightly ISO as the recommended way to try the distro out. It needs a 64-bit Intel or AMD processor with at least two cores running at 2 GHz or faster, 4 GB of RAM, and 40 GB of storage, with an SSD preferred.

An ARM64 build is yet to make an appearance here, so people on that platform will have to wait a bit. Similarly, creative apps like Grid, Stage, Reel, Sessions, and Canvas are also set for a later arrival.

Luma

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openEuler Wants Linux to Treat an Entire AI Cluster Like One Single Machine

For most of its life, Linux has been built around one simple assumption. There's a box; it has CPUs, memory, and devices, and the kernel manages them. Clusters exist, of course, but they've mostly been a problem for the layers above the OS, i.e., schedulers, orchestrators, distributed frameworks.

AI infrastructure wants more. Today's training and inference setups bind dozens of CPUs, NPUs, GPUs, and memory pools so tightly together that they behave less like a group of servers and more like a single but very large computer. And then come AI agents, which don't just run a model but spin up tools, sandboxes, and long-running sessions on the fly.

That was the core of the keynote Xinwei Hu, Chairman of the openEuler Technical Committee, gave at Open Source Summit Europe 2026 in Prague.

Let's see how openEuler is innovating Linux around agentic scaling.

The problem: the server is no longer the unit

openEuler's keynote slide describes the shift as moving "beyond the box," from a single host to a SuperPoD. A SuperPoD is a tightly interconnected system where compute, memory, and accelerators across many nodes are linked and expected to work as one pool of resources.

That creates trouble the classic OS was never designed for. Memory you need may sit on another node, a fault on one machine can ripple into others, and moving data between hosts and accelerators becomes a bottleneck. And somebody has to manage the whole thing.

Hu grouped openEuler's goals for this into three buckets: ease of use, reliability, and performance.

SuperPoD OS: making a rack look like a server

The ease-of-use goal is ambitious. openEuler wants runtimes and SDKs that work out of the box on SuperPoD hardware, and system administration that is assisted by an agent, so that you can manage a SuperPoD "like a single server."

Reliability is of upmost importance here. According to Hu, openEuler can notify other nodes of a node failure with a latency of 500 ms or less, and can notify individual threads when shared memory develops a fault. It also aims to isolate faults so they don't spread across processes on the same host or across nodes. There's also "fault storm suppression," a fast response to remote memory faults so that a flood of SEA errors doesn't hang the system.

On performance, the Hu's keynote cites two figures. UMDK, which openEuler describes as a unified heterogeneous interconnect infrastructure for SuperPoDs, cuts RPC latency by 20%. An asynchronous pipeline plus unified memory addressing cuts RH2D (Remote Host-to-Device) latency in KV cache operations by 20%.

All of this sits on UnifiedBus, a hardware interconnect protocol in the same family as NVLink, RDMA, and CXL. openEuler's architecture slides show two layers built on top of it. The UB OS Component adds device management, memory pooling, inter-node communication, and virtualization to existing OS components. The UB Service Core adds higher-level services (memory, communication, I/O, a resource engine, virtualization, serverless, and a compiler and runtime).

The part I find most practical is how applications reach this. General-purpose apps keep using the standard POSIX API with transparent calls, while AI applications can use the UB Service Core API directly. If an app needs a memory pool, the UBS Engine finds which servers can spare memory, exports it from them, and imports it into the local machine.

We covered the UnifiedBus foundations in more depth earlier if you want the background.

Where mainline Linux stands

openEuler isn't alone. Mainline Linux has been working on the memory side of the same problem for a few years, mostly through CXL, an open interconnect standard that lets servers attach or share memory beyond what sits on the motherboard.

The idea is to present far memory as just another NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) node, so most applications don't need to change.

That's roughly the philosophy behind openEuler's transparent POSIX path. The difference is scope. Mainline mostly deals with extra memory attached to one host, while SuperPoD OS tries to coordinate memory, devices, and faults across many hosts at once, on a Huawei-originated interconnect rather than a vendor-neutral standard for now.

Agentic Scaling: an OS for workloads that think in loops

The second half of the keynote moves from hardware to how AI itself is scaling. Hu's slide traced three phases. First came "big is better," where intelligence is fixed during pre-training. Then came test-time scaling, where models get smarter through post-training and spending more compute at inference time. The third phase is Agentic Scaling: building new system architecture around the way agents actually behave, while keeping costs under control.

The pitch is aimed squarely at open-weight models (models like DeepSeek, Qwen, and Llama, whose weights you can download and run yourself). openEuler's argument is that this ecosystem won't reach the frontier by chasing raw model size. Instead, it should use the control you get from running models locally to build intelligence at the system level.

Here's what it means. An agent doesn't just call a model once. It runs tools, executes generated code, keeps memory across long sessions, and spawns many short-lived tasks in parallel. Each of those is an OS problem: isolation, startup time, memory management, and recovery.

openEuler's agentic infrastructure slides tackle three of them.

Sandboxes. Agents running code need isolated, disposable environments. openEuler's sandbox stack works with Firecracker, StratoVirt, gVisor, and Cloud Hypervisor, and is compatible with Kubernetes and E2B APIs. Using prewarmed pools and snapshot recovery, the project claims cold starts down to 20 ms (a 70% to 95% reduction), over 2,000 concurrent sandboxes, and task recovery times cut by more than 50%.

KV cache. The KV cache (the model's short-term working memory for a conversation) grows fast with long contexts and many users. openEuler's approach spreads it over four tiers: HBM on the accelerator, local DRAM, a shared DRAM pool across nodes via UnifiedBus, and SSD or object storage for cold data. Combined with a global index that lets one instance reuse cache built by another, the project claims a 30% to 70% drop in time to first token and 1.5x to 3x higher throughput.

Agent memory. For long-term agent memory, openEuler showed oGMemory, built on the openGauss database with vector, full-text, and graph search. The slide claims it halves token overhead and improves task completion by 20%.

What this means for Linux

I think the most important takeaway is that the definition of "the machine" an OS manages is changing, and openEuler is one of the few distros building for that openly.

There's a fair caveat, though. UnifiedBus and the TaiShan and Atlas hardware platforms are closely associated with Huawei's technology ecosystem, and much of the SuperPoD stack is optimized for these platforms.

The real test is how much of this work flows upstream into mainline Linux and plays well with vendor-neutral standards like CXL, rather than staying an openEuler-specific feature. Given that openEuler already counts itself among the top contributors to the Linux kernel, that's the thing worth watching.

Either way, the questions Hu raised (how an OS handles memory it doesn't physically own, faults it didn't cause, and workloads that spawn themselves) are ones every Linux distribution will have to answer soon.

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RustGIS is a Desktop GIS Tool That Also Runs in a Browser

Qiusheng Wu has put out the first release of RustGIS, a new open source GIS application with an announcement on X. v0.1.0 is available right now for anyone to use, along with a second release, v0.2.0, that has rolled out close on the heels of the first one.

The tool's ribbon-based interface will be familiar to you if you have used a modern office suite recently, and the tool itself allows you to analyze map data in various ways.

The release notes for v0.1.0 mention that it comes in 15 interface languages, has support for over 1,000 tools from the GeoLibre and Whitebox suites, and the editing tools cover feature templates and snapping, along with domains and attribute rules.

So, let's check out what RustGIS has to offer. 👇

Who is it for?

GIS stands for geographic information system, which is software for working with data tied to places on Earth. A GIS stacks layers such as roads, rivers, and population on top of each other, matched by location.

Working with those layers in RustGIS starts with analysis tools such as buffer and clip, plus SQL-based selection. Guided workflows cover jobs like viewshed analysis and finding the shortest path. The v0.2.0 release added SQL queries through DuckDB Spatial too.

The app opens common files like GeoJSON, Shapefile, GeoPackage, and GeoParquet, while large files are streamed. You can also open GDAL formats such as File Geodatabase, GPX, and DXF if you install ogr2ogr.

There's AI assistance too! 🤖

The AI Assistant is a chat pane that answers questions about the data or runs commands on the map. Undoing a change takes one step, and commands that touch files or the network wait for approval.

The command line can also render maps and chain tools, while an MCP server lets agents such as Claude Code and Cursor run RustGIS commands and generate maps.

Download RustGIS

If you are looking to try it out, RustGIS is suitable for terrain and hydrology work and for anyone who wants to execute repeatable workflows from the command line. Newcomers might also find the assistant's plain-language prompts easier than wading through the menus.

The newest release at the time of writing was v0.2.0. You can visit the downloads portal to grab binaries for Linux, Windows, and macOS. If you prefer a web-based solution, RustGIS is also offered as a WebApp.

RustGIS

The project hosts the source code for this on GitHub, and it also has a comparison table that shows how RustGIS fares compared to other tools like ArcGIS Pro and QGIS.

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With 10.0 Release, ONLYOFFICE Goes All in on AI, Making it the Most Modern Office Choice for Team Collaboration

ONLYOFFICE is rolling out AI tools across every editor in its suite, but the open source versions do not have them built in. The company says the choice came in response to user feedback, making it so that those versions would require separate AI tool installations.

If you didn't know, they have a few main offerings. Docs is the editor suite that you self-host or integrate into other platforms, while the Desktop Editors bring the editors to Linux, Windows, and macOS, and DocSpace facilitates room-based collaboration.

There's also the Workspace bundle of web apps and mobile apps for iOS and Android.

With the ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0 release, they are introducing a wide range of fixes, as well as modular apps that should help make your workflow easier.

🆕 ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0: What's New?

ONLYOFFICE Docs now has a home screen with an Discover Apps category that lists four pre-installed free apps: Files, Rooms, Forms, and AI agents. Each of these is an optional modular app that you use when the need arises.

In short, Files handles storing, organizing, and sharing files, Rooms is for collaborating with other people, Forms is for building forms and analyzing responses, and AI agents can be used to deploy agents for automating tasks and answering questions.

That last one supports MCP servers and can be used for extended reasoning, search, and personalized knowledge base use cases.

What about the editors?

Let's begin with the PDF Editor. The Redact tab now has a "Remove hidden information" option that clears metadata before you share a file, and the Comment tab offers a signature option, with automatic table recognition being available for the Edit Text function.

In the Document Editor, a new "Keep with next" feature has been added to the advanced settings for paragraphs that stops a heading from being separated from its content, including in tables and block content.

Inline objects such as graphical formulas behave more reliably in right-to-left documents, and line-based cropping trims content that runs past the line height. Horizontal lines, which was introduced with Docs 9.4, also get its own settings window.

For collaborative sessions, a new "Follow/Stop" option appears in the list of users editing a file. If you click on it, your mouse's cursor will take you to that person's cursor; clicking on "Stop following" ends tracking.

The Spreadsheet Editor features speed-ups, usability tweaks, and formula aids. Large workbooks should feel quicker, as styles and data are now stored separately and fewer cells are processed.

Copy and cut actions now draw a dynamic outline over the selected cells for quick verification glances, sheet backgrounds are kept intact when files are saved and reopened, and function constant hints appear as you type.

Similarly, for the Presentation Editor, you can now export presentations as a GIF or video file, while the View tab gives you access to a bunch of new views that include the Outline View, Reading View, Notes Page, Notes Master, and Handout Master.

The print settings are broader too, with notes, handouts, and outlines all being printable from the File tab.

The AI bits

Each editor has a dedicated AI Tools tab that launches the AI chat, with common actions preloaded as prompts alongside any you save yourself.

Text documents can be summarized, rewritten, translated, and proofread, with a table of contents, title, and formatting added on request. Presentations get outlines, slide titles, speaker notes, and visual ideas.

In a PDF, the AI can summarize in one click, answer questions, draft emails, and redact confidential details. In spreadsheets, it can tidy messy data, write and explain formulas, spot trends, and build forecasts and Pivot Tables.

For one-off jobs such as changing tone, there are tools such as Quick AI actions and AI assistants that keep running while you edit. Though these are only offered in the Document Editor for now.

If you go the cloud way, you will have to top up a wallet to get access to the ONLYOFFICE AI service, which handles model configuration and deployment for you.

For self-hosting, you will be able to use any popular cloud-based AI service or a local one through tools like Ollama.

📥 Download ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0

The cloud version of ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0 is available now through DocSpace, and a free account is enough to try the editors on the platform. If you were looking to host it, then you will have to wait a little longer as the update is still rolling out for self-hosted solutions.

On the other hand, if you are an individual user running Linux or a walled garden platform, then you could opt for the Desktop Editors.

ONLYOFFICE Docs 10.0

For more details on this release, you can refer to the changelog and the official blog post.

Suggested Read 📖: LibreOffice doubles down on its no AI stance.

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