LibreOffice has every single UI metaphor as a preset option to choose from. You can switch between hierarchical menus, tabbed ribbon menus, single and multi-line toolbars and a sidebar option akin to iWork. Try changing the UI to Tabbed if you prefer a Microsoft Office 2016 style of menu. They also added the compact tabbed mode similar to the compact ribbon introduced in 2021.

LibreOffice has had the option for a while now to switch to a ribbon-style layout if that's your thing. I've left it on the classic layout because IMO the ribbon's lack of customisability makes it less useful.

Do you think Office has a better UI then class LibreOffice? I guess that's an opinion, but in my opinion the Office UI is terrible, Microsoft is a master at terrible UI design. Compare Gnome / KDE / XFCE to the Windows desktop, and right away you notice Microsoft can't build a desktop. Another opinion, the Office 365 licensing is some form of a mix between intentional incompetence, weaponized incompetence, fraud, and a lack of requirements. The very fact that Office 365 can fail to activate on Windows 11, in some random cases, demonstrates the licensing is so broken, as to mitigate any attempt at producing an effective platform.

Have you tried to buy the right license for the right job? Microsoft has made it intentionally impossible, outside of luck, to pick the appropriate product, the first time. They have N tiers for the same tools, with intentionally misleading descriptions, no clarity on the differences, pricing that looks like a paint cannon went off, and if you try to get support, just shove a dry butt plug in your ass, it will hurt less. Do you want to get into the administration side? No, just no, I don't have the strength and mental energy right now.

Even if they did build Office 365 for Linux, it wouldn't matter. Office 365 is considered a train wreck of an Office platform, its name is used as a joke. The only reason people still use it, is because Microsoft forces it in your face during installs and updates, they even place download icons in the start menu. If Office 365 had to compete in the real world, on a fair playing field, no one would ever touch it.

I don't even have to bring up the terrible formats and extensions, they're bad, and are a universal symbol of the incompetent professional, but we don't even have to worry about that.

What? Working with LibreOffice is wayyyy more efficient than with MS Office. You actually find things and it does not take tons of clicks to do stuff. It does not permanently stand in your way. MS Office really has no chance in a direct comparison except with a few Stockholm Syndrome sufferers and these can still activate the stupid and cumbersome "ribbon" interface in LibreOffice as well.

And incidentally, LibreOffice, being derived from StarOffice has 40 years of development history. That is 5 years more (!) than MS Office.

I've been using LO pretty much constantly for the last two years (even wrote a novel on it). Like any interface, it just takes time to become familiar. In fact, I like the way Writer organizes styles and style configuration far better than Word, and often, even for DOCX files, do initial style set up and layout in Writer and then move to Word if I have to (which is seldom enough).

LO is a damned good office system. Its default UI is older, but since I used MS-Edit and Word pretty extensively back in the 1990

Yeah. pretty sure it is not intentional. It's just years of kruft stacking on top of each other. They could probably clean up the specification, but it would break stuff left and right. One thing Microsoft actually does well is backwards compatibility. Sometimes you just gotta clean house though.

Yes that explains the complexity, but not the ongoing bad naming of the options.

I once had to re-implement an application based on specification document. When doing that, several times I encountered a situation where I noticed that the documentation was not specific enough. I then realized that it would be extremely helpful if a specification would come with a sample code that implements it.

That's one of the two big complaints about OOXML: that Microsoft took their old binary formats (which, as you alluded in your post, were a essentially memory dump of the application's memory with new features overlaid on top of old ones), gave the fields meaningless names, and dumped them into XML. This was beneficial to Microsoft because they didn't have to write any complex conversion code (from the old binary formats to OOXML and vice-versa), but it's not the ISO-class format they promised the world (yet

Can't find any concrete references (too lazy). But I remember many of us (here on Slashdot and other dens of iniquity) laughing at the insanity of the OOXML format when it first emerged. Especially given the pre-existence of ODF.

The [1]Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] does tell us the number of pages the standard runs to - it's greater than 120.

It also suggests there have only been two major releases of the format and the problems seem to have been baked in from day one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

Indeed. And ODF is not that much worse.

Yeah, after you get used to it, LaTex works quite well. I do my manuals in it and have for years. Originally I used Frame back when Sun was a thing. Both Frame and LaTex have one huge advantage over MS, or at least used to. Size. You can do 3K page docs no problem in LaTex. A friend who was a tech writer would moan bitterly about MS products crashing if the client demanded she use MS.

^This^

That's always been my issue with the *Nix stuff... sure, it might run fine and be more stable (and if a user has the programming knowledge, completely editable to whatever they can dream up), but for the vast majority, it's too complex to get it running without having to read a document the size of the Bible, let alone open a file made in Office 2016 or whatever (whether it's a PowerPoint or Word or spreadsheet document).

While FOSS is a great idea, the problem is compatibility.

The general purpose of a

It sounds like you're venting about a Microsoft-branded bug up your ass until the last sentence, which makes it seem like it's all been sarcasm. Was that your intent or am I reading you wrong?