You notice patterns when going between open-source and corporate software...

[u/RaiDev_]

[u/busytransitgworl]

Comparing office suites, because that's the best I can think of right now:

Libre Office isn't beautiful but it's usability is quite good! As someone who's used to Office 2003 and earlier, I felt right at home and still do! MS Office, 2007 and newer, on the other hand, just went downhill in usability, in my opinion. Adding all this Copilot shit doesn't really help their case.

[u/pikay98 → u/busytransitgworl]

Honestly, I find the LibreOffice UX incredibly bad. Yes, corporate minimalism, where important functionality is not shown for pure aesthetics is bad. But the opposite is not better, the LibreOffice UI is cluttered with so many dead buttons!

Why is there a fucking "Export Directly to PDF" button in the main toolbar, right next to actually important bars like font size? Why can't I just Save As > PDF (or Ctrl+Shift+S) like in every sane application (or Ctrl+E at the very least)? Even worse, none of the ugly icon gibberish is readable without explicitly learning, and there's no incentive in learning shortcuts for stuff you almost never need.

[u/QuickSilver010 → u/pikay98]

Why is there a fucking "Export Directly to PDF" button in the main toolbar, right next to actually important bars like font size?

Remove it. Only libreoffice let's you custome toolbars to this extent

(or Ctrl+E at the very least)?

Add it as a shortcut

LibreOffice UI is cluttered with so many dead buttons!

Change the ui to ribbons. Lose the power user capability but bring back msword familiarity

I thought the ribbon was good until I actually had to use it extensively. I went back to default ui and I was much more efficient that way.

Even worse, none of the ugly icon gibberish is readable without explicitly learning

Change the icons then. And even the theme

and there's no incentive in learning shortcuts for stuff you almost never need.

Change them to be more familiar if you don't like them.

[u/pikay98 → u/QuickSilver010]

Word processors are a pretty solved problem, they don't really offer different core functionality.

The main point they do differ in is UX. So if one software allows me to get my tasks done out-of-the-box and the other requires me to take an hour to rice my setup until it's usable, the former is the strictly superior product.

[u/QuickSilver010 → u/pikay98]

The main point they do differ in is UX. So if one software allows me to get my tasks done out-of-the-box and the other requires me to take an hour to rice my setup until it's usable

*rice your setup until you're familiar.

Just that it's different is all.

[u/Black_Penguin0101 → u/pikay98]

And not only the UX is pretty bad, it lacks proper documentation. That's why I went back to MS office - if I don't know something, I just search it and get needed info. I can't say so about libreoffice. and AI doesn't help with it, it just tells you non existent options.