Libera Suite

A desktop office suite you can own. Libera Suite opens the documents other people send you (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, ODF), edits them on your machine and saves them back. It runs on your own computer, with no account to create and nothing in it that phones home.

Four editors share one application. The file picks the editor, so there is nothing to choose.

Abilian builds the host as free software under the Apache License 2.0. The editors inside it are Euro-Office (itself an AGPL fork of ONLYOFFICE by Ascensio System SIA), running locally and unmodified.

Using it

libera report.docx        # a window, in Words, because the file says so
libera budget.xlsx        # Tables
libera *.pptx             # one window each
libera                    # the start window: new, open, recent

What works today sets out the full list with its gaps. It covers editing, saving and exporting, with PDF in the Save As popup. It also covers blank documents of all four kinds, images, printing, spell check in six languages, crash recovery and a Recent list.

libera -v FILE            # what it is doing; -vv how; -vvv every request
libera --diagnose         # everything worth pasting into a bug report
libera --payload-status   # which editors are in use, and the revisions they were built from

How it works

The editors are a web application. Everything they cannot do in a browser (read a file from disk, convert it, save it, list the fonts, put a dialog on screen) they ask of one injected JavaScript object, window.AscDesktopEditor, which the host exists to answer.

We implement it in Python, behind the webview your system already ships. The host serves the editor over a loopback HTTP server and defines AscDesktopEditor before the editor's own code runs, so nothing about the editor itself changes.

Five thousand lines is a codebase a small team can read in an afternoon and still be maintaining in ten years.

We do not fork the engine. The patch queue is 28 patches across three upstream repositories: 24 of them make it build on macOS, 3 are configuration and branding, 1 fixes an upstream UI bug. None touches the editing engine, so following upstream means rebasing build configuration. Every release records the exact revisions it was built from, so the corresponding source is a commit plus a series that provably reapplies to it, and make patches checks that it still does.

Everything we ship, we build. build/ compiles the editors and the native converter from pinned upstream sources, including on macOS, where upstream publishes no binaries of its own.

Where it stands

Early, and running. All four editors work today on Linux (x86_64 and arm64) and macOS (Apple Silicon). Windows is not started.

Tabs, file locking, and signing and notarisation on macOS are still to come. Linux has a menu bar and a launcher entry; neither carries keyboard shortcuts, because pywebview's GTK menu has no way to attach them. What works today lists the known issues, so an evening spent reporting one is an evening wasted. The roadmap says what comes next and what we have decided against.

The most useful thing you can send us is a document that renders wrongly, attached. The layout engine is upstream's and mature, so where output is wrong it is far more likely to be our packaging (a font we did not ship, a resource we failed to serve) than the engine.

Installing it

Install gives the full instructions for each platform.

Linux: the Flatpak. The bundle carries the editors, GTK and WebKit, so there is nothing else to fetch and nothing to get wrong:

flatpak install --user libera-0.1.0-amd64.flatpak     # or -arm64
flatpak run eu.liberasuite.Libera

Linux without Flatpak, and macOS. The libera command comes from PyPI and fetches the editors on first run:

uv tool install libera                            # macOS
pipx install --system-site-packages libera        # Linux: the flag is not optional
libera --payload-install

macOS works today. libera is on PyPI and the payload origin is serving, so the block above is the real thing on an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14 or later.

Linux works on both architectures. Payload 0.2 is built on Ubuntu 22.04, and x2t from it runs on Ubuntu 22.04 and Debian 12, x86_64 and arm64 -- measured in a clean container of each. Payload 0.1 needed Ubuntu 24.04. Release 0.2 is what remains.

Building it

git clone https://github.com/abilian/libera-suite && cd libera-suite
uv sync
make payload-all                 # fetch, patch, build, assemble, smoke-test (long: V8 alone is ~30 min)
export LIBERA_PAYLOAD="$BUILD_ROOT/out/payload"
uv run libera document.docx

make verify      # everything below, in the order that fails fastest
make test        # 314 tests: unit, the host over HTTP, the editor in headless Chromium
make lint        # ruff, ty, pyrefly, mypy, biome — green, and expected to stay that way
make smoke       # the converter: fonts, docx -> odt -> docx, docx -> pdf
make patches     # does the patch queue still apply to the pinned SHAs?

The test suite enforces one house rule: assert on content, never on exit codes. A converter that writes an empty document exits zero. A PDF with no glyphs in it is the right size. So the end-to-end run photographs the editor's own canvas and measures the ink on it.

The package and the command are libera. The repository directory is local-office.

Credit

Libera Suite is based on Euro-Office, itself based on ONLYOFFICE by Ascensio System SIA. The same line appears in Help ▸ About inside the application.

The editors, the document engine and the format support are theirs. That is the hard part: twenty years of correctly reading a .docx written by somebody else's software. The host, the packaging and the desktop integration are ours. We are grateful for both.

Licence

Libera Suite ships as two artifacts, and they carry different licences.

The host is Apache-2.0: everything in src/libera/, which is the whole of this package.

The editor payload is AGPL-3.0: Euro-Office plus our patch queue against it (GUI assets are CC-BY-SA-4.0). It arrives as a separate download or inside a Flatpak, never vendored into the wheel.

Licence and attribution has the corresponding-source detail: what each release records, and where to fetch it.