I've been using LibreOffice since StarOffice 5.2 (which had its own taskbar).

It really is amazing. The best trick in Writer is to use the "Styles" sidebar and apply document-wide styles to the document like you would in CSS. This makes layout in large documents a breeze.

If you don't like the UI, there's "View > User Interface..." where you get to choose between 7 different UI layouts.