excited to see what this means for the project, the poor UI/UX of libreoffice is easily its most glaring flaw imo
FYI: You can use the new Collabora Desktop Version of LibreOffice with a streamlined interface if you want.
https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-online-now-available-on-desktop/
Hey I just used libre writer today. It was a smooth experience. Surprisingly easy ui.
software engineer, team lead, and manager at Red Hat for more than 20 years.
Please keep this man away from ui/ux. Nerds designing UI is how libre office got in this mess in the first place.
He is not designing the UI, he will be implementing it.
The UI and UX will stay bad as it is, just on a modern technology stack.
Why do people keep saying “UI/UX”?
UI is user interface.
UX is user experience.
One is to be developed (with code), and the other is to be designed (in Figma for instance). They have very little overlap!
Libreoffice is dope af.
Agreed, if you grew using another program, switching is hard unless it’s UX/UI is superb.
When I ditched Adobe, Inkscape was a breeze. GIMP is hard AF and Krita a bit easier but it doesn’t have the features I need. I ended up using Photopea, and now I’ve tried Affinity and it’s the best Photoshop alternative I’ve tried yet.
Collabora is looking pretty good so far. Still a few rough edges but easier than any other FOSS office software.
GIMP is well worth getting used to, especially now we are post 3.0 with a proper non-destructive workflow for filters/effects. I had always found it confusing to learn, having the Photoshop UI fossilised into my neural pathways, but what unlocked it for me was following an online GIMP course for 2/3 hours, which amounted to far less time than I had formerly spent cracking photoshop or working to pay for it.
Some great plugins are coming out now too. The Batcher plugin in particular makes GIMP (and GMIC by extension) extremely powerful for automation.
Good times.
Inkscape is my favourite Linux program. And the UI got so much better the last few years.
Inkscape was hell for me when I tried it years ago. I just had no clue where to find stuff and how to navigate properly. Maybe I have to give it another try.
Says more about you than Inkscape. Seriously. It’s build like literally almost every other program out there. Tools to the left, menus at the top, navigation and other windows at the right. How can you not find stuff?
This comment also says more about you than me. Not so seriously.
I’m quite serious. That’s why I wrote “seriously”. ;-)
I guess I hit a nerve, since you didn’t tell me how you can not find stuff…
I love Inkscape, it’s so intuitive! I didn’t even need to read the docs. And now that Affinity is coming to Linux I’m hoping I can switch my work to these options.
now that Affinity is coming to Linux
Wait, what?
Edit: I’ve only found this and if this site were to be trusted, I would take it with a grain of salt. https://techcentral.co.za/affinity-for-linux-canvas-next-big-move-could-reshape-the-desktop-software-market/274861/
Yes, I feel bad recommending LibreOffice to people who only used paid software, as the UI is quite a hurdle. Installing a theme and symbol-pack was the first thing I did, even before editing or writing something…
Recommend OnlyOffice instead. It’s like LibreOffice but it doesn’t look like complete garbage and actually modern.
Recommend NOT using onlyoffice.
Elaborate?
LibreOffice is great, beats OnlyOffice in many areas, and OnlyOffice is controlled by a company.
Imo OpenOffice is much friendlier to use than libre office. I would never recommend libre in the state it’s currently in.
Waiting to see what Collabora ends up looking like as the only real viable alternative.
I honestly fail to see what’s wrong with the UI? Sure, it’s not pretty but it is functional as it is.
The insane amount of clutter. Compare LibreOffice to OnlyOffice
tbf you are not using the tabbed ui in LO. it improves things quite a bunch.
I never tried looking into UI options, I use just OnlyOffice nowadays but LibreOffice should consider turning that on by default if it’s an option.
OnlyOffice also has a 10/10 screen when you open it, instantly asking whether you want to open a text document, PDF, make a slideshow etc. It’s just very polished and they actually put effort into the UI.
They are comparable. Three bars with icons, normally you don’t have that vertical window on the right.
It looks dated for sure, but it’s not that cluttered.
So, you compare classic menus in one of them with a ribbon menu in the other? Don’t you know how to compare? Do you also compare car speeds with one driving in reverse and the other i 5th gear?
LibreOffice is always this cluttered. It’s an outdated mess of a GUI.
I guess you don’t know how to set it up, even though it takes your hand and shows you. That’s just sad… :-)
I’ll give you an example since you clearly don’t understand heuristics.
Look how OnlyOffice highlights selected buttons with a light gray tint.
LibreOffice on the other hand highlights them with very strong blue color, which draws the users attention and distracts them from the document.
There are many more very bad design choices that LibreOffice makes, but it’s just a cluttered mess in general and can really put in some work to hide away all those buttons. Yes if you know where they are and use them every single day then it’s more efficient, but it takes up a lot of (mind) space to see all those buttons all the time.
it works, but it’s far from ideal. a lot of features are tucked away behind unintuitive context menus, and on some systems you need to do a bit of configuration for it to look right. for example, it uses bitmap icons by default, so if you use a hidpi screen the icons will look atrocious until you figure out how to switch them to vector icons.
and an ugly UI is a problem by itself. it’s uninviting, unwelcoming. it gives a feeling of jank, of amateurism, and not in a good way. if you open the app for the first time and immediately think “this looks like it was last updated in 2003”, it’s not a good thing.
are tucked away behind unintuitive context menus
That are well documented and don’t change once you figure out where they are. “UX” is code for “we’ll rearrange everything you need twice a year and force you to constantly re-learn our app because fuck you.”
if you open the app for the first time and immediately think “this looks like it was last updated in 2003”, it’s not a good thing
Why not? To me it’s reassuring because it means the procedures I memorized years ago probably haven’t changed. It’s the same reason people like the command line so much. Office software UI is a solved problem and arguably peaked in 2003 before MS Office started adding all the bullshit, it doesn’t need to be updated every single year.
it works for you because you got accustomed to it. cool! genuinely! but not everyone is a power user, not everyone will want to sift through documentation to find out how to do the thing they want that’s easy to do with word
from the non-techy people i’ve spoken to who’ve used libreoffice, they all agree that it’s worse than ms office because it gets in the way more. it’s harder to do stuff, because it’s less intuitive to them.
people in 3d modeling use blender. people in audio production use audacity. people in office work and schools, usually, do not use libreoffice, because if you can afford ms office it’s just better for them. maybe that will change with office now being ai-infested webviews held together with gum, javascript and ever increasing subscription prices… then again, that hasn’t slowed down adobe
imo the upcoming audacity 4 is an incredible example of open-source ui redesign, and should be an inspiration to everyone. the ui is sleeker, faster, easier to use, and yet it’s still familiar to existing users! but you can do good stuff without recreating the whole ui from scratch like they did, of course
Check out ONLYOFFICE for what a UI should look like.
Boo. It’s one of the last GUI software without user infantilization syndrome. Go use Google Docs if you want your software to coddle you.
I swear if LibreOffice starts talking to me like I’m a child like MS Office does or starts having animations that actively slow me down and spike my CPU usage just to open a menu or something.
Also, I’ve noticed a pretty strong correlation between “modern UX” and instability in office software. I don’t think I’ve ever had LibreOffice crash on me, the last major UX revision of MS Office definitely crashed more often than LibreOffice, and the latest version of MS Office crashes at least once every time I have to use it taking my unsaved work with it even with autosave on. I don’t know what “experience” they’re aiming for but not crashing and causing data loss should probably be prioritized over making it look pretty.
I understand that real men like you want their software to hit them in the face on start-up, and then refuse to do anything until you type SUDO, but LibreOffice UI isn’t even “good” kind of difficult. It’s not like Vim, where once you learn how to use it you become much more productive. LibreOffice is just a plain old mess. You start by selecting one of four UIs, where you need to guess which one actually works (I remember that a basic feature that I needed, after the extensive search, turned out to be unavailable in the UI that I selected at the start).
Yeah lol I tried the Tabbed UI and then went back after it was unusable
Maybe the “you never get a second chance for a first impression” is indeed unfair but it is hurdle for adoption.
In my case my motivation to keep using and trying LibreOffice is driven by the hate for MS and not by the love for LO.
For example: I went through some eye surgeries and really needed a dark mode. But I couldnt get a dark mode in which buttons still were cleary visible. Icons not showing well and hard to tell what they were for. Meaning I kept hoping the tooltips showed something usefull. But “reading” icons is a bit strange … I am sure if I search forums, git issues and documentation something usefull will turn up.
And maybe its infantile like you said but I sure like contextual filled menubars since PaintshopPro in 2005. So whats with the empty menus showing a handfull buttons and everything else in some cornermenu? Seems like a waste of screen real estate.
As for dataloss: sure my data wasnt lost but loading and pivoting a 90k row data table made Calc freeze and only restarted after killing it. 90k is not for everyone but it sure isnt a lot either in spreadsheet land.
I went through some eye surgeries and really needed a dark mode. But I couldnt get a dark mode in which buttons still were cleary visible.
I am sure if I search forums, git issues and documentation something usefull will turn up.Ask and ye shall receive: https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/issues-with-libreoffice-icons-on-dark-mode-in-linux-mint-22-cinnamon/111034
This is great, thank you! I had not gotten around to actually attempting to troubleshoot this, but was just accepting that I should just know where the buttons are for now.
They can develop multiple UI’s. One for normal users and a classic one for people who like everything without a single menu bar or drop down menu to abstract the clutter away
They already have four. What they need is one which supports 100% of the features, is easy to use and selected by default. They might keep other more advanced UIs but forcing new users to select UI as a first step, before they can do anything in the software is just plain stupid.
