https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-microsoft...
Also, the productivity suite formerly known as Office is these days called "365 Copilot".
It exists for one reason only, which is OSS fervor. Great, but that doesn’t lead to great design.
I understand their copying the MS Office look and feel because that muscle memory is key to converting users. I like the way they didn't go all-in on those ribbons which have always been pretty terrible.
In that sense I think the biggest issues with the product is that it's taking so many cues from MS Office which on its own is pretty terrible but has grown to be abundant.
I think the whole office workflow is grossly outdated anyway. Excel is mostly misused as a pisspoor database which it deeply sucks at because it doesn't offer any way to safeguard data integrity. What MS should do is overhaul Access completely to make users grok it better. But they don't care.
Word docs are still full of weird template issues, PowerPoint still uses the old overhead projector transparent slide paradigm.
What it really needs is someone to look at this without any of the 1980s baggage and come up with tools for workflow problems from this century with techniques that fit this century. Adding an AI clippy like MS has done does not cut it at all.
But it does mean having to chip away at the entrenched market position of office, that's the problem. Microsoft stops innovating when they've cornered the market, just like they did with internet explorer. Someone has to do a chrome on office, but it will need someone with a big bag of money. Not an open source project run on a shoestring.
So yeah I think LibreOffice is not great but the not great bits are copied from MS Office because they simply have no alternative.
> pointlessly going against expectations
If you're referring to the ribbon, I'm not sold on its superiority. The vast majority of other software still uses the familiar menu structure, which is what LO uses too.
Granted, well meaning educational programs expose students to MS Office and its paradigm, from an early age. For their sake, I eagerly await a coding assistant AI powerful enough to reskin LibreOffice to look just MS Office, ribbon and all.