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I use Softmaker FreeOffice, which I find to be better than LibreOffice. LibreOffice is a good faith project, but the legacy from Sun StarOffice is still there.
by 29athrowaway 6y ago
I use Softmaker FreeOffice, which I find to be better than LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is a good faith project, but the legacy from Sun StarOffice is still there. Namely, a non-polished UI that in many aspects looks less-polished than other major office suites.
The project roadmaps also do not give me any hope that will be better in the future. There are shapes with physics simulation, but the most user facing aspect of the product, the UI, looks highly neglected.
I tried cloning the LibreOffice repo to tweak the UI to my satisfaction, but after witnessing the escheresque 4D spaghetti code that implements it I simply deleted the repo and continued doing something else.
Adding features will not change the fact the UI still looks like Sun StarOffice.
- nice__two 6y agoLO has its own platform abstraction layer (called SAL), which only supported pixel-precise layout of elements. That meant that the longest string in any of the supported languages dictated the element layout. Caolán McNamara (of RedHat) added support for automatic layouts a few years ago. Since then, LO has been cleaning up its dialogs and has innovated a lot (e.g. by introducing the notebook bar). This simply wouldn’t have been possible previously. Compare it with Apache OpenOffice and you’ll see why.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoSure. An amazing engineering feat... but the UI still looks the same as it did years ago. Compare the UI to MS Office, WPS Office, Softmaker Office, etc and rank the UIs by level of polish.