I used to love LibreOffice when it was OpenOffice.org. When it got unshackled from Oracle, it somehow became kinda uglier, and unfortunately it wasn't able to keep up with the times technology-wise, as all efforts to make it online are a failure of usability and speed.
What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can be self-hosted and would natively use OpenDocument file format.
I do not care whether LibreOffice looks ugly or not.
What I care is that the documents that I generate with LibreOffice look beautiful and that depends on me choosing beautiful high-quality typefaces (not the default ugly typefaces of LibreOffice) and on choosing adequate formatting of the documents.
All that LibreOffice has to do is provide adequate support for all OpenType features and for all formatting options that one might want. LibreOffice does this and at least LibreOffice Writer does it better than MS Word.
In LibreOffice one can still discover quickly in which menu or dialog box the desired option can be found. I have been using MS Office for decades, but in recent versions I can spend many minutes searching for some option that has been moved into some random menu/toolbar that has no obvious logical relationship with it.
While MS Excel remains much better than LibreOffice Calc (but the latter is adequate for most simple tasks), I would consider as a cruel and unusual punishment to be forced to use MS Word instead of LibreOffice Writer.
Unfortunately the LibreOffice Impress is pretty bad. PowerPoint is what keeps me using Office. LibreOffice formatting looks bad on the screen (it resizes bitmaps to make the fuzzy) and the user interface for constructing slides is both clunky, slow and buggy. I don't understand how the UI can be this slow in 2025 on a fast PC. Basic functionality, like resizing an equation, just doesn't work.
I'm no Microsoft fanboy but LibreOffice is hideous and the compatibility has not kept up even after the MS Office formats moved to xml. Also, most of my interactions with Office Documents nowadays are through the online tools. I don't even have to install a binary on my computer anymore.
These enterprises should invest a fraction of what they used to spend on Microsoft Office into a development effort to modernize LibreOffice. Last time I tried to use it, it seemed like it was on life support in relation to Microsoft Office.
While LibreOffice has a ton of things that should be improved, I hope that it will never suffer a "modernization" that will make it more similar to the recent versions of MS Office.
In my opinion, MS Office has been improved steadily during the decade ending in 2003/2004, then it has stagnated, then it has been degraded continuously until today.
The UI of LibreOffice is ugly, but it is easy to do with it what you need. The UI of MS Office has become extremely convoluted for any of the more sophisticated tasks.
What I mean by modernization is to have online viewers/editors so I don't have to install a virus delivery vehicle on my computer to create and edit a document. It's not specific to LibreOffice but I'm very hesitant to install binaries on a computer nowadays. Especially ones that open user-created files. These present attack vectors for bad actors.
Also, the content creation is stuck in 2004 as well. It works perfectly fine if you're creating an IEEE-formatted research paper or similar wall of text but if you're creating something you want to give to customers or to look professional and nice, it's literally the last program you'd want to use to accomplish that. There's no nice way to say it.
Hideous? It looks just like any word processor to me. A dated look, yes, but I wouldn't call it ugly.
What needs modernizing precisely? IMHO the UI for most things in libreoffice's word processor is simple and easily found. Can't say the same of word these days.
> What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can be self-hosted and would natively use OpenDocument file format.
There's an effort called numerique, out of fr and de governments. It seems to have docs, spreadsheet and meet now, and more on the way.
For me, their grave sin is basing on MSOffice file format. THat way you're destined to always be at a disadvantage when the competitor will want to outdo you.
I don't care for MSO format support, nor ribbon interface. What I lack is capability to collaborate on the documents online, Google Docs-style. Also, OpenOffice.org used to be really stable, and LibreOffice somehow crashes on me every other day while doing nothing special, just editing some simple letter.
What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can be self-hosted and would natively use OpenDocument file format.