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Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by maxdo on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:26PM (#50486704)
every time i open libre office, i do think that micrsoft is paying them lots of money to stay that ugly.

In reality the office work will be replaced not by libre office, but something like claude work. It's an obvious direction.

Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by bigyabai on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:28PM (#50486725)
Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I usually don't spend my time editing documents caring about how pretty/ugly the editor is.

I quite like that Libreoffice let's me disable the confusing "strip" layout that MS Office pushes on everyone.

Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by netdevphoenix on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:30PM (#50486754)
Curious comment indeed made on a website not particularly known for a beautiful design
Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by maxdo on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:36PM (#50486868)
For presentations internally i switched to https://bento.page/ , my agents doing all kind of great CSS animations.

it's not about styles, it's UX, stupid encoding questions, every time you open it, not able to handle big enough spreadsheets, and tons of problems like this.

Also changing document formatting is a pain, i do not want to do it manually , i want ai to do it for me.

On styles, office packages are more often an external communication tool, send a doc, report, to a customer, prospect etc, How can you make the doc ascetically good, if entire office package tools looks like from 90s, scroll is lagging, etc.

Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by pndy on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:05PM (#50487334)
You can see on reddit case what happens when you start adding the "beauty" factor instead of staying with the minimal interface. It may be surprising but for many hn looks good and the only thing it could have is the dark mode - which can be bring with userscripts.
Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by dizhn on Friday November 13, 2026 @06:00PM (#50491358)
The beauty factor is the facade for their full on enshittification plan. By the way I quite literally get angry when an app spends time with a bolted on dark mode instead of quite literally any basic feature. I see it all the time. The app barely works but the feature they (and a ton of users) are happy about is dark mode or a new theme.
Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by maxdo on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:31PM (#50486768)
try to open sreadsheets, especially wide/big one, and you will love it even more. I literally have to do non intuitive moves and fall back into gdrive or claude docs.
Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by SoftTalker on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:34PM (#50486822)
Yes I feel the same way. I even prefer it, it maybe looks a little dated but it's a denser UI and doesn't waste as much space on my screen.
Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by svachalek on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:30PM (#50486752)
In other news, Claude outages today.
Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by bigstrat2003 on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:37PM (#50486875)
Who cares? I use software to do a job, not to have pretty graphic design elements.
Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by kbrannigan on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:38PM (#50486908)
It it can do the job, i'll take ugly.

Why do you think CLIs and TUI are making a huge comeback.

Web applications were prettier but so bloated and so slow.

Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying." by win311fwg on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:00PM (#50487253)
> Why do you think CLIs and TUI are making a huge comeback.

1. Terminals finally got some design attention and became beautiful.

2. The apps within those terminals are now easily able to inherit that beauty.

It is most definitely still possible to create an ugly CLI/TUI, but it is harder to do so under the constraints imposed on them as compared to when you have free rein over a GUI. For every CLI/TUI we're seeing these days someone has also created a GUI that does the same thing, but the GUI UIs are ugly compared to the equivalent CLI/TUI options.

A world-class designer can make a GUI great, but the vast majority of designers are average at best. Restricting their design freedom increases the chances that they'll create something decent than if they had full freedom to exhibit their lack of design skill.