Hacker News Reader

Using LibreOffice feels like the software equivalent of visiting a historical re-enactment village where everyone dresses in costume and pretends it’s still the 90s.

The project feels like a preservation society for a type of software from the past.

View on HN

Except that MS Office functionality hasn't changed much since the 2003 suite, they just adopted the questionable Ribbon UI while continually reskinning it to match the design trends of the day.

Have you tried any of the new UI layouts?

I don't like to criticise anyone's efforts, but yeah and honestly they look like stage makeup on a corpse. The whole thing's just 'off'. It's like a bad illusion, almost like it's trying to con me! I know that's not very logical but that's the gut reaction I have whenever I try to use it. There's probably some psychology in there it'd be interesting to study.

The psychology is "it's not identical to what I'm familiar with." That's what kept me on Windows for years, getting past it just takes dealing with it for a bit while you get accustomed to it.

But I don't feel that when I use for example Pages, Apple's word processing app which has a different user interface to Word. That looks very different, but feels solid, authentic and high quality and I don't get the same feeling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com