Comment by nico
10 hours ago
This is probably great software. But the design, both of the site and the office software, looks so dated, it doesn’t even tempt me to try it
10 hours ago
This is probably great software. But the design, both of the site and the office software, looks so dated, it doesn’t even tempt me to try it
I don't care about dated looks. I do find MS Office's pressure to use OneDrive frustrating and annoying. Honestly, older UIs for office suite products just feel more direct and responsive than the clever ribbon bars. Excel used to be svelte (25 years ago or more...) Now it feels bloated and clumsy. LibreOffice Calc (same parentage as Collabora Office) feels more like Excel used to feel. Similar complaints about Word.
It is actually very, very janky and behaves like someone tried to reimplement ~15 years old Office UI in JavaScript. Not in a good way.
I really, really want them to be successful, but I cannot pretend it's a pleasure to use at all.
When I tried it last, it was painfully slow. Have there been any improvements on the performance front lately?
Typing in a word processor should not have input lag in 2025. It wasn't just a little lag, but the type and watch it catch up kind of lag.
It's laggy on MacBook Pro M4 Max. I have no idea what is it doing.
Could you be more specific?
Working with data I need to be objective, and while thinking objectively I prefer brutal/minimal ist UIs
It looks like MS Office, what's so bad about it?
It looks like a 2015 wordpress template
The open source world needs more designers.
A lot of open-source doesn't have a process to integrate and follow a design strategy from a designer. A business can mandate that work be done to adapt/follow a given design strategy... for open-source it's often harder to do so... and even then you face the same or more resistance to change.
It took basically a corporate control for Audacity to make its' difficult transition to a better design from its' mediocre one. That said, I'd love to see something modern transformed from The Gimp's core in a similar way. That doesn't even begin to cover what you might want in terms of inter-app collaboration...
KdenLive, Blender, Gimp, Krita, InkScape, Audacity and other tooling, as an example, all use different UI/UX base libraries, and no clean way to cross-integrate features between them if someone wanted to assemble an open-source Adobe alternative. There's no baseline equivalent to even MS/Office's use of COM/DCOM for interoperability.
Good points. Designers need to be first-class citizens whose input is sought early on, not to attempt to make a purse out of the finished pig's ear. RFCs are a venue for this. Designers, for their part, need to share their ready-to-go libraries in all the popular frontend frameworks. The two could also collaborate on developing tools to automate design linting, similar to automated code review programmers use.
Looking at what they did to commercial software that used to have excellent, high density UIs, maybe they should stay where they are.
For the past week or so I’ve been using pencil.dev and I’m impressed. It’s like a local Figma that connects to Claude code or cursor, and you can just ask it to design stuff
It definitely has its bugs and it eats up tokens/context like crazy. But it make product development so much easier and faster, while providing great design