The Document Foundation is the small non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. It oversees the project and community, and is now expanding with new developer roles. So let’s say hello to Dan Williams, who joins the team to work on design and user interface (UI) improvements, with an initial focus on macOS: Tell us a bit about yourself! I’m from the USA, have lived on both US coasts at various times, and now live back in the “midwest” where I grew up. I was previously a software engineer, team lead, and manager at Red Hat for more than 20 years. In that time I’ve worked on a large variety of projects, from local networking to cloud networking to desktop software. I spent two years helping build the One Laptop Per Child software stack which was an eye-opening experience from a UI and design perspective. I believe passionately in free and open-source software; all the code I’ve written so far in my career is open-source. Oddly enough, I’m not new to the LibreOffice community; I was an OpenOffice contributor and co-founded the NeoOffice port to Mac OS X (now called macOS). That led to being hired by Red Hat to package and improve
excited to see what this means for the project, the poor UI/UX of libreoffice is easily its most glaring flaw imo
“this looks like it was last updated in 2003”, it’s not a good thing.
Speak for yourself. I grew up alongside the internet so I’m not past the age of tech literacy. I specifically switched to LibreOffice apps because I was tired of Microsoft putting more focus into UI and AI than keeping their office apps efficient and not an annoyance to use between accounts. I had a personal account without 365 and a work account with it and the dance of switching between them on my personal PC was annoying.
If I open a libre app that looks like its from 2003, I know any document I need to send to another device will open without having to sign into an account. I just open it, work on whatever I need, and get done. No need to sign into a password manager or getting 6 e-mails about someone signing into my Microsoft account or 2FA.
Speak for yourself. I grew up alongside the internet so I’m not past the age of tech literacy. I specifically switched to LibreOffice apps because I was tired of Microsoft putting more focus into UI and AI than keeping their office apps efficient and not an annoyance to use between accounts. I had a personal account without 365 and a work account with it and the dance of switching between them on my personal PC was annoying.
If I open a libre app that looks like its from 2003, I know any document I need to send to another device will open without having to sign into an account. I just open it, work on whatever I need, and get done. No need to sign into a password manager or getting 6 e-mails about someone signing into my Microsoft account or 2FA.