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