Skip to content

Libera Suite and Euro-Office Desktop

The same engine, a different shell.

Libera Suite and Euro-Office Desktop Editors use the same components. sdkjs, web-apps and the x2t converter come from the Euro-Office repositories, at the revisions of their published releases. A document therefore displays, imports and exports the same way in both, our fixes apart. What differs is mostly the application around them.

Euro-Office Desktop Editors keeps the architecture of ONLYOFFICE Desktop: an embedded Chromium browser (CEF) and a Qt interface, in C++ (the desktop-sdk and desktop-apps repositories).

Libera Suite replaces that layer with a few thousand lines of Python and JavaScript. The components are displayed in the web engine the system already has: WebKit on macOS and Linux, WebView2 on Windows. They cannot tell the difference. They talk to the same native interface (AscDesktopEditor), which we rewrote.

That choice has several consequences.

  • Size. For version 9.3.5-2, Euro-Office's macOS .dmg is 926 MB and its standalone Windows installer 616 MB. Libera Suite downloads about 90 MB of components, plus an application of a few megabytes.
  • Installation. pip or pipx, Homebrew (macOS and Linux), Flatpak, a Windows installer, or one curl | sh line.
  • Command line. libera --convert *.docx -t pdf converts documents without opening a window.
  • Fixes. We build everything from Euro-Office's sources, with a published patch queue. It is mostly about the converter, for OpenDocument and CSV files. Euro-Office's releases do not include those fixes today.
  • Licence. The application is under Apache 2.0, and the components stay under the AGPL.

Euro-Office Desktop has a few features today that Libera Suite does not have yet: tabs, PDF editing and forms, digital signatures, and connection to a Nextcloud, ownCloud or Seafile server for co-editing. The roadmap says when they arrive.

In short: to get all of ONLYOFFICE Desktop in a European project, Euro-Office Desktop is the right choice. Libera Suite makes a different bet: a lighter application, made of short code that a small team can read and maintain, which adds features without touching the editing engine.