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Welcome Dan Williams, new LibreOffice Developer focusing on UI/UX - The Document Foundation Blog
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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I honestly fail to see what's wrong with the UI? Sure, it's not pretty but it is functional as it is.
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.
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."
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.
The insane amount of clutter. Compare LibreOffice to OnlyOffice
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.
I don't think LibreOffice is 'bad' either, the functionality is great and the foss license is superior to Onlyoffice
But when I compare it to Word and OnlyOffice (especially OnlyOffice since it's free and open source) it lacks that polish and good default settings.
Not everything has to be to be VIM, good defaults are very important especially for novice users. And OnlyOffice has understood that very well.
I would like for LibreOffice to succeed. Therefore I hope they take some design cues from OnlyOffice or have a good UI developer even come up with something better. Basically I hope the guy in the post is going to town and heavily modernizes the current default LibreOffice layout.
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.
Oh, so in a colorful toolbar, you are distracted by a single color? Sounds like an ADHD issue, and not a real world one. I have never seen or heard anyone but you say (Oh, I really can't work with this, I'm soooo distracted by the light blueish color that is behind the selected option)...
Here's a pro tip. You can change the color of the selected option in you menu. You can even chose different themes that changes that. I'm sorry to hear, that this is a dealbreaker for you. I surely hope that you'll stay away from LO or other free software, because you are too fragile to use them anyways.
Oh so after getting valid examples of objectively bad UI design you start complaining?
It seems like a you problem, that you can't function in an app that highlights the current chosen option with a light bluish color. 🙃
Oh, BTW, I know a lot of people using LO, that hasn't got perfect vision. They would not be able to navigate in a toolbar where there only is a slight shift in the light of a color. It's perfectly good UI design to make it the way LO does...
There's clearly plenty people in this very post complaining about the UI/UX of LO as being bad. You can have anecdotal examples of people liking it but I bet most of the ones that don't also have more examples.
Of course that it's a us problem. Problem is, us is the huge majority, and if the huge majority thinks that the UI is bad, it kinda is...
Do you know the difference for something being bad, and something being rudimentary? Show me an UI/UX that doesn't have a lot of people complaing about something?!?
Oh, are you the spokesperson for "the huge majority"? Please show me where that was decided... Talk for yourself, don't try to claim the right to speak for others.
Whoa my bad I didnt' know I could just change every setting and spend hours to make it look like something else does out of the box.
Well, it takes me about 3 minutes to make it look exactly like I want it to... So yeah, your bad...
It kinda doesn't? The first time you open a file (because let's be honest we don't open the program itself usually) 4 popups show up,, which you close because you want to see the damn file, and then the UI change is all gone.
Having the user click some buttons from popups on the first launch to enable the good UI is bad UX. Simple as.
Here, have a cookie...