this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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Meanwhile the state of the UI/UX on Linux: I dare you to rotate your paper in LibreOffice Writer to ~~portrait~~ landscape in under a minute, if you haven't recently used the function.
To add one datapoint: I actually installed LibreOffice just now just to try it out. I went via
Format > Page Style > General [this tab was open by default] > Orientation: Landscape
If that is the correct way, then it was, IMO, hard to miss and fast to find. If it was the wrong way*, however then I'd say I find the menu labels misleading.
*I am not quite sure, because the dialogue had the Title "Page Style: Default Page Style", so I would have expected pages in all new documents to now start out in landscape orientation, but I opened a new document, and the page was in portrait orientation. So, I think I did what I tried to do - change orientation only in the current document - in spite of that (misleading, thus proving your point?) dialogue title.
42.07 seconds. Have never used the function before. I just used the "search commands" function.
Layout > Orientation > Landscape(I presume you meant that since the default orientation is Portrait)Took me about 3 seconds.
For me it was under Format - Page Style, burried in some long dropdown menu. It is absolutly not user friendly, if you are new to the software or don't use it very often.
I needed one minute to find it and I kind of knew what I was searching for (a window with all the settings for the page). The UI should be made in a way where the slowest user (apparently me) will find such essential functions fast, like in every other writing software (MS Office, OnlyOffice, Google shit, ...).
So for me the UI of LibreOffice is a bad one.
To be fair, you seem to be using the original UI that mirrored Word 2003's UI (which, when I first switched over to Linux back in 2012, I was positively thrilled about Writer having as it was basically a drop-in replacement for Word, then).
I dunno if I just occasionally used Word too many times since then but I find the old UI impenetrable now, as well; but LibreOffice has support for the Ribbon UI (and 2โ3 similar ones, I think), as well. Maybe you might find it easier?
I almost never switch the orientation of Writer so I genuinely was pretty much finding how to do it for the first time.
Maybe that's a point that Dan Williams can address: The default presets are important. With your UI I would have found it much faster, because it is where I would expect it to be.
Tantacrul/Martin Keary has some nice videos about how he redesigned Audacity and Muse Score. The point about how important sane presets are comes up quite often.
When you install LibreOffice now, the set-up guide encourages you gently to use the newer, friendlier tabbed interface. I don't know if the same is true for in-place updates.
24 seconds.
<15 seconds.
Including starting LibreOffice Writer. This is on a 5400RPM HDD and Writer was definitely not cached, since I haven't opened it in days.
Now how long did it take to start MS Word on my laptop again?
I think you and many of the downvoters are missing my point:
If the default setting leads me to an UI, where I, an average user, needs so long to find such a basic function, then the UI is bad. And I am very patient, but if you want to convince the average MS Office user, that Linux + LibreOffice is an alternative, then it needs to be better then this.
And I am obviously disappointet that they hired someone with a focus on MacOS and not Linux, where a big UI/UX overhaul would be needed. It sais in the article, that the new hire will also look at overall improvements beside MacOS, but that won't be enough to polish the UX to the point where people would prefer LibreOffice over MS Office.
I am not sure about that.
The default UI is similar to the old MS Office Word and the new alternative (which from what I remember, LibreOffice actually asks you to choose from in a dialogue on first start, so you don't need to look through menus to set your preference) uses the newer tabbed paradigm.
And while I do prefer the new one, I didn't find the old one any harder than MS Office Word 2003 or the older version that came around Win 98.
The only thing that made me different from the average user back then, was that I actually read and understood user prompts before clicking "Next" or whatever.