LibreOffice says Microsoft Office exploits you, offers free ODF migration guide | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice says Microsoft Office exploits you, offers free ODF migration guide

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77 pointsbundie29 comments

The problem with LibreOffice is that interface is so ugly. And no, I am NOT asking for the ribbon, which I think is a horrible idea.

I think LibreOffice needs a general refresh of marketing and product for simplicity. The LibreOffice website, you have to dig in to see what features are provided. The product itself has a lot of bells and whistles but as you mentioned it is hard to discover.

A feature that isn’t noted but is quite cool is LibreOffice Base’s ability to connect to remote databases and create forms on top of those. Basically a better Access.

> so ugly

I think this is a common issue with open source software, except when it comes to GNOME/GTK/Libadwaita apps. For some reason, GNOME apps almost always manage to look good.

It's easy to make something look nice when you drop "being useful" as a requirement.

Libadawaita apps look good as graphic design, but at the cost of usability. KDE apps (real Qt, not Kirigami) always have some standout icons, mismatched margins or strange styling decisions, but all the features are more or less where you'd expect them to be and, more importantly, they actually have all those features because they weren't cut for the sake of design.

Frankly Gnome apps are very strange. Things are hidden in weird menus in odd places with barely noticable icons. Like... it's pretty and things are there but it makes no sense to me. It's like the mental model going on whiffles over my head. It's nice but whoever this is designed for does not even remotely think like I do. If that makes sense. I don't know if I'm just overwhelmed with UIs being different everywhere (Android vs iOS vs Windows vs MacOS vs every website doing it's things to be unique) but it feels like an extra and unnecessary puzzle that somehow hasn't gotten the memo about what's "common" or "typical" or emergent in the pile of visual chaos. Don't get me wrong, some parts they do the best (mostly shell related) and I miss them instantly on Windows or MacOS but some things (mostly in individual apps like the text editor and PDF viewer) really leave me scratching my head.

You know, I did kind of think that until I sat down to use it and realised compared to MS office it’s like a glass of ice water in hell.

I do actually think on Mac if you just use the minimal toolbar buttons and the menu bar buttons it looks pretty presentable. Not good but not the worst. And on Linux/GTK it actually looks super nice

Libreoffice comes with a few different themes and icon sets. Have you tried them out?

It doesn't matter. Most people go with the defaults. If your default is ugly, your app is uggly.

Also the themes and the themes are not that great and not sharp looking, specially in dark mode. I’m using it out of principle but the design needs an overhaul. I was considering doing the design using some open source icon set but time is limited.

Its also slow and laggy compared to office products somehow. Has that classic open source jank.

Its reminiscent of Wordperfect 6 for Windows.

Genuinely, have you looked at modern screenshots? When in ribbon mode, it's basically the same as MS Office.

LO Writer: https://i.redd.it/0ps5cvvffdf21.png MS Word: https://erinwrightwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Wor...

Got any other "ugly" spots? All the "old" menus (like editing a paragraph style or list style) look kind of bad on both, but at least MS Word's print preview got a facelift (used to be even worse than LO, now it's quite a bit better).

I run LO on KDE on Ubuntu 24.04 at work. The menus were hiding lots of stuff with a weird gray on slightly less gray color scheme. It felt like they hate users, but then it hit me: The Gnome and KDE styling are somehow infighting. A 5 minute journey in the LO settings menu turned it from a hunt-the-label game into not-productivity-damaging good enough UI.

I have copied over the config for a few Ubuntu versions so I assumed some setting got wonky, but reading this thread, I wonder who else has to suffer this.

Are people still using single user desktop office suites?

It makes me wonder if there's some kind of light decentralized thing that can be used with a convention oauth style front end

I do. Although I have no love for Office, it allows me to keep all of my data locally seamlessly.

With online-only tools, I'm one unfair ban away from losing all my data.

Interesting. I just searched for "banned from google docs" and some people seem to either be questioning whether it happened to them or if it is possible.

I never considered that possibility.

I guess my other question is word processing programs usually have a target format of paper ... is that how you're still using it?

As far as I'm aware it's not banning you from Docs itself, but getting an account nuked for any external reasons (For a random example, Copyright problems on Google Drive or YouTube)

I don't use Word much. When I do, I use standard US Letter size. I rarely print to paper, though.

I use PowerPoint and Excel more frequently nowadays. Excel happens to be truly exceptional.

Bro I just wanna write my CV and do my dad’s taxes I don’t wanna collaborate with 100s of my favourite redditors while leveraging AI

I guess i just live in a bubble where everyone uses org mode or other nerd tools to do that

Does your mom use org-mode, or does she use Word?

nah, she's big on neovim.

Excel on the desktop isn’t going any where.

MS Office isn't single user? It supports real-time collaboration, including in the desktop apps. Though that does require you to keep the files in onedrive or sharepoint.

Source: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/08/15/guide-to...

I've been using LibreOffice for many years at this point and it's been just fine.

One of the biggest dangers you have with Microsoft if you're not in the USA, the US government can turn off your access for shiggles.

AT THE current rate of things, its probably more dangerous they'll install fancy keyloggers.

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