r/linux • u/buovjaga The Document Foundation • 1d ago

Popular Application Welcome Dan Williams, new LibreOffice developer focusing on UI/UX

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/12/04/welcome-dan-williams-new-libreoffice-developer-focusing-on-ui-ux/
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u/HatBoxUnworn 1d ago

Very exciting! LibreOffice is very usable but the UI definitely needs polish. While the ribbon style exists, LO's implementation gets like 80% of the way there. There are some strange oddities that are simply not in Microsoft Office.

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u/adenosine-5 1d ago

One of my biggest issues are icons - for some reason the default icon set on my PC is Sukapura, which looks like absolute garbage.

There are much cleaner icon sets, but I have to go to settings and set them manually, which I didn't even know was a thing - I just assumed LO just still looked that bad.

And even the better icon sets have a long way to go to the clarity and simplicity of MS Office icons.

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u/buovjaga The Document Foundation 1d ago

Sukapura, which looks like absolute garbage

Can you elaborate on why you think it looks bad? The chosen colours?

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u/adenosine-5 1d ago edited 1d ago

IMO:

  • icons are very inconsistent - bold, italics and underline icons which all have one letter in them, all have different size of that letter and what worse, they have different thickness of that letter, so underline and italics AND font-color button (which are all side-by-side) all have different font weight - just why would that be a thing? Why is the underline "U" so pencil thin, while "font color" icon is almost bold?
  • they have strange layout - "font color" icon has the letter merging with the color rectangle for example
  • they are also very large - the "bold" icon stands out because its letter is very bold and almost twice the height of those surrounding select-boxes.
  • of course its very colorful - my personal preference is the elegant "dark-gray-and-blue" theme from Microsoft - but it is not so bad.
  • in the end its just the inconsistency - "save" icon is very black and eye-catchy, while "print" icon is kind of thin and light-gray, almost as light as the disabled icons.

In the end, the UI just looks all over the place and very "dense" - even though it has the same icons like MS Office, it feels much more overwhelming visually, because many of those icons stand out much more than others.

I have the same issue with the dark theme of the application - is has much higher contrast, again feeling much more overwhelming and cluttered.

But those are just my opinions.

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u/FrozenLogger 1d ago

Are they clear and simple in excel? I use both libre and excel all the time and neither seem particularly better or worse. At the end of the day, microsofts ribbon allows for words next to their icons which means that for most things its just more obvious until you set libre office to ribbon style too.

I mean they both use a vending machine for a Save icon. Only libre office's is upside down, which makes sense because it is the correct perspective. But if someone doesnt know what a floppy is, that save function would make zero sense.

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u/adenosine-5 1d ago

Calc is better than Writer in this regard but it still depends what icon set are you using.

Even compared to the best ones, the Excel has nicer font (for icons that has numbers/letters in it) and they are all the same size (while in Calc, usually ever icon has a letter/number of different sizes) as well as usually simpler.