When I was at Intel in the late 90's, early 2000's, one CPU project decided it was going to use it exclusively. It was agonizing: slow, terrible UI, buggy, missing a lot of features. I never tried it again, did it get better? It's tragic that there is no competition in this space (rip Lotus).
There was a long period of time where LibreOffice Writer had severe performance regressions due to a rework of graphics handling that removed most of the image caching. If you had a slower system or a high DPI / Retina display it could be agonizingly slow due to constantly rescaling images on the CPU. It started sometime in either 3.x or 4.x and didn't get resolved until mid ~7.x. I stayed on an old version for a long time.
I actually found it pleasantly similar to the older versions of MS Office, before we got the ribbons, also with customizable themes and actually a decent amount of layout options: https://imgur.com/a/libreoffice-ui-80hwOp0
What personally bothers me more is the performance, which can be pretty hit or miss.
Still, I hope the project remains going for the decades to come.
It's subjective. LibreOffice UI is why I stay away from MS Office. I can't find anything in MS Office anymore, I have to rely on their "search for command" feature (or whatever it's called) to be able to do anything. LibreOffice is mostly intuitive for me. On the other hand, my father does not like it and keeps nagging me to buy him the MS product (I can't justify the costs for his casual use though).
> LibreOffice UI is why I stay away from MS Office. I can't find anything in MS Office anymore,
Exactly this. I much prefer LO to any version of MS Office since 2007. And early in my career I trained people on how to use MS Office and was something of a domain expert.
18Y ago they threw that into the shredder along with all my knowledge and muscle memory. What little functionality is left is literally not worth the pain and annoyance of trying to use it.
I think that sometimes making drastic UI changes like MS Office did is one of negative incentives of commercial software. They always need something visually noticeable to justify added value of new versions.
Unlike Word at least you can still select all its options without having to run it maximized hogging all of the screen. I'll take that over over prettier and unusable.
Which one? It has 7 different UI paradigms you can choose from.
Personally i like the "Single toolbar" UI, it only shows a menubar and a toolbar with the most common stuff, which i find a great balance between minimalism and discoverability.
Though i only use like 1% of LibreOffice's features - and really only use Writer (which i mainly use as a dumb rich text editor) and Calc (mainly for a few calculations one could most likely even do in VisiCalc :-P).
