schizoidmanLibreOffice calls out EU officials for using Microsoft Excel, ignoring ODF
And if you’re one of those people who think that Office is superior to LibreOffice because of its ribbon interface, the TDF thinks you’re wrong and that you only tolerate that layout due to a psychological normalization effect forced by Microsoft.
The UX engineer seems to be in charge of PR too. Not that it’s completely wrong, just a fucking hilarious thing to be saying.
LibreOffice is missing the forest for the trees with this: yes, the ribbon isn’t the greatest paradigm, but the open-source suite looks like it hasn’t had any visual update at all since 2003.
I’m pretty sure a facsimile of the ribbon interface is available in LibreOffice.
There is… It’s just really not very good. Last time I checked, it didn’t have keyboard shortcuts.
It’s just really not very good
So it’s a faithful homage to the ribbon mess, then. Yay!
Rather than a facsimile, I’d just call the LibreOffice ribbon a distant cousin because they’re both office applications. The ribbon does slightly ease the friction of getting people to try LibreOffice, but like with the Windows UI and KDE Plasma, the similarities are surface-level and there are tons of differences. It’d be cool if public education taught people the UI of the commons first, not of the Microsoft defaults.
looks like it hasn’t had any visual update at all since 2003
You’ve pointed out another great feature – no change-for-change’s-sake bullshit.
Document editing is a solved UX : except for occasional minor changes, there’s no need to fuck with the UI. Compare Tesla fucking with cabin controls in the cars and how the planet is going back to having the fucking knobs in the cars instead of in the design meetings.
I honestly think this is the trouble with a lot of open source software, unfortunately. People are used to sleek UIs and switching to something dated looking that is open source can be jarring, even if it may have all the same features as a paid app.
I just took another quick glance at LibreOffice, and the problem is the whole thing is half-baked to the point where the old UI actually is a problem. The dark mode color contrast is almost white on black, and with a white page it makes the menu items hard to read. Fonts are jagged. And the ribbon - which LibreOffice chose to implement at least a year ago now - shows underlined letters on the menu, but they are not accessible using Alt keyboard shortcuts.