Every time I try to use LibreOffice (and OpenOffice before that), I end up terribly disappointed by the software quality compared to 'equivalent' Microsoft or Apple products. Have things improved lately?
OpenOffice is as good as dead atm. LibreOffice, to date, as far as I can tell, mostly focused on fixing the mistakes from OpenOffice days (as in, code cleanups and refacturing the code) and improving the compatibility with Microsoft Office. In those aspects, seems like things have improved quite a bit.
Unfortunately, it still looks like it was made in the year 2000. libreoffice-style-sifr icon pack kind of makes the things a bit less obnoxious, but there's still a long way to go. I've read mixed statements from the LO community about the possible switch to ribbon interface, but even if they decide against it, they need something.
My biggest mistake about the whole LO project is that I somehow ended up on one on their admin mailing lists (for https://ask.libreoffice.org/) and I just can't find a way to remove myself from it. I contacted them five or six times already, and ended up empty handed every single time.
I thought ribbon was really bad for productivity, as it's just a less-effective mega menu, or a mega-menu which hides some options without providing any mechanism to see everything. My understanding was that an application had to go to full mega-menu, with all the options visible, or traditional dropdowns w/ alphabetized groupings and lots of iconongraphy.
You can move the most-common features to the ribbon, which would improve productivity for most people. Of course you'll never hit every use case, but you can make the average case a lot better.
Honestly, in the long run, I feel the ribbon is more or less a productivity wash. Not a huge difference either way. But as with most large rearrangements of UI, familiarity was dealt a blow. Office has had the ribbon for nine years, and with that familiarity back intact, I find no serious issues with it.
God, I hope ribbon isn't on the table. Searchable menus are the way to go, imho. Just give me a good way to pin menu items to the toolbar and I'm happy.
I hate that ribbon interface. LibreOffice seems to really hit the mark for UI for me. I guess it really depends what you need, but the only time I've found LO lacking was with filtering a massive spreadsheet (which really should have been in a DB anyways).
Ribbon is really great, but you cannot just use it for free for Office-competing products: "There’s only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can’t obtain the royalty-free license"
It has gotten considerably better recently but in all honesty it still lags behind MS Office.
That said they did a massive (insanely massive) refactor and removed decades of cruft to whip it into shape and now they are focussing on new features so I expect it to improve pretty rapidly in the next year or two.
I have to say yes, things have improved. Perfect for home use; we use it for budget stuff, drafting the typical documents, school stuff for my daughter, etc. But haven't fully tested it with hardcore, crazy sophisticated (business intelligence-level) spreadsheet formulas that one might encounter in the workplace.
I use LibreOffice (mainly Calc) for personal spreadsheets and documents, but the UI is outdated. Worse than the look, I cannot use my familiar Excel keyboard shortcuts and instead have to learn new key combinations to improve my productivity (or use the mouse/trackpad and learn to slow things down). Since my use is occasional, I get surprised many a times when weird stuff happens due to my muscle memory hitting something or doing some action expecting an Excel-like result. :)
I still like LibreOffice (Calc) and the fact that it's actively developed. It's not as bad as StarOffice/OpenOffice was a long time ago, but at the same time it is a bit of a resource hog and startup times are a bit longer compared to MS Office.
I don't want the ribbon interface to be added in LibreOffice. I just want a nice modern looking UI with nice fonts and support for older MS Office (2003 style) keyboard shortcuts.
(The newer MS Office keyboard shortcuts after the advent of the ribbon are horrendous. Every new version loses some more older, quicker shortcuts.)
I haven't used MS Office in about 10 years. To be honest I've never had "quality" issues, unless you're referring to the look and feel of the UI, which yes has come leaps and bounds in that time (although I'd argue you to the grave on that being a more important standard of quality than standards compliance, and MS Office has always been shocking at that. They had to be ordered to implement ODF by the European union if I remember correctly).
It remains quite different in workflow, so the transition will always be jarring, but I find it just as odd going back to MS Office now as you would going the other way.
LibreOffice is indeed awesome and I'm really productive with Writer & Calc. But Impress is a real pain. I write something and I always end up with somethink like "Oh dear no I don't want you to do this. Ok, I'll make this trick and hit enter, backspace to avoid magic ... ah no, this time this does not work. Let me just start over and try with pasting from elsewhere .. just the final edit and ... argh"
Unfortunately, it still looks like it was made in the year 2000. libreoffice-style-sifr icon pack kind of makes the things a bit less obnoxious, but there's still a long way to go. I've read mixed statements from the LO community about the possible switch to ribbon interface, but even if they decide against it, they need something.
My biggest mistake about the whole LO project is that I somehow ended up on one on their admin mailing lists (for https://ask.libreoffice.org/) and I just can't find a way to remove myself from it. I contacted them five or six times already, and ended up empty handed every single time.