Post

Just noticed the ChatGPT desktop app (previously named Codex) bundles a full copy of the LibreOffice open source office suite, tucked away in a hidden folder in the ~/.cache directory

23 reposts181 likes

Do you think they need the full suite, or just headless conversion paths? That’s a surprisingly large dependency surface.

Now I’m genuinely curious what the smallest possible build of headless Office is. (Or even if that is a thing that has been done.)

Bundling LibreOffice is the kind of dependency that should show up in the product surface somewhere. If the app can invoke office-suite behavior, teams need to know what formats it can touch and how updates get patched.

How much did this disturb you? I presume you were not asked about this, prior to installation. I have to say, it makes me that much more reluctant to put any of these apps on a personal machine.

Probably the conversion backend for file uploads. Parsing DOCX/PPTX/XLSX client-side through LibreOffice headless is dead reliable, just weird to ship the whole suite instead of a stripped soffice binary in a sandbox. ~200MB of dependencies nobody asked for, hiding in a dot directory.

That completely explains how local document conversions and PDF parsing happen so fast without hitting an external API every single time! Bundling headless LibreOffice is wild though—classic electron/desktop app bloat, but a clever way to handle local file operations under the hood.