Mandrake Linux creator develops an open-source office suite to stop his wife from using Microsoft
A suite for 2?
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- Gaël Duval built ElixirOffice after his teacher wife kept returning to Microsoft Office.
- The suite keeps Microsoft-style ribbons, shortcuts, and document behavior for familiar workflows.
- ElixirOffice is free, runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and makes artificial intelligence features optional.
- Its Euro-Office roots bring licensing disputes and security concerns around OnlyOffice-derived code.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
ElixirOffice, an open-source office suite based on Euro-Office infrastructure, maintains Microsoft’s user interface and keeps AI optional.
Gaël Duval, a French entrepreneur and the creator of Mandrake Linux, a discontinued distribution known as Mandriva, has invited the first testers for his office suite designed for people accustomed to the Microsoft Office user interface.
“Started from a personal need, forked from Euro-Office. For: Linux, Windows, MacOS + server version. AI-assisted project,” Duval wrote in his post on W.
Duval says he created ElixirOffice for his teacher wife, who was repeatedly offered open-source office suites at work but kept coming back to Microsoft Office.
“Not out of brand loyalty: the alternatives felt unfamiliar, documents from colleagues did not look right, and the habits of years – the ribbon, the shortcuts, where things are – did not work anymore,” he writes in the project’s GitHub profile.
Duval says ElixirOffice attempts to “keep the strong, mature engine of an existing open source suite” while ensuring that user experience and documents look the same as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
ElixirOffice vs Microsoft Office
ElixirOffice “behaves like Microsoft Office,” according to Duval, maintaining the same ribbon tabs and groups, mini toolbar, contextual tabs, and keyboard shortcuts, among other features.
The creator emphasizes the “privacy by design” architecture, stating that the suite is telemetry-free and doesn’t send data to the publisher.
“In the desktop app and in the optional ‘convert locally’ mode, documents never leave your computer: they are converted and edited entirely on your machine,” the GitHub profile reads.
AI is optional, as the suite is complete without it. However, users can configure a model using any OpenAI-compatible service, including Ollama, on their own computer.
The model can then be used to structure documents, such as to make lists and tables, among other things.
ElixirOffice is free and released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Troubling code roots
ElixirOffice is built on the infrastructure of Euro-Office, a productivity suite developed by a group of European companies, including IONOS, Nextcloud, and EuroStack. The software, released in June 2026 as a browser extension, is now also available as a desktop app.
Euro-Office, meanwhile, is a fork of the open-source productivity suite OnlyOffice, owned by the Latvia-registered company Ascensio System SIA.
The firm accused Euro-Office developers of violating the software’s licensing terms and principles of international property law.
They rejected allegations claiming that collaboration with OnlyOffice wasn’t possible due to the company’s lack of transparency and ties with Russia, among other reasons. Creators said they are reviewing and cleaning the codebase.
Ascensio System SIA says its Russian business segment was sold to investors in Russia in 2019.
However, Cybernews researchers found that the majority of the code Euro-Office runs on – and continues to import – appears to have been written by developers working with Russian time-zone settings, raising security and privacy concerns.
