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Comment by r3bl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

There is no "possible switch to ribbon interface". No matter how the new toolbar interface turns out, it will not replace the sidebar.

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"

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/11/21/licensin...

Except if you probably pay MS a royality fee.

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