LibreOffice might be a great office suite, but the community doesn’t like the fact that the UI still looks kind of dated. The good news is that anyone with some coding skills can try to fix that by working on the project.

The LibreOffice users have noticed some improvements for the interface that have landed in the past few years, but the office suite has the same general design. This design was OK a decade ago, but that’s no longer the case. The rest of the ecosystems have evolved tremendously, and LibreOffice has started to look a little out of place. Whether users start it on Windows or in Linux OS, things around it look much prettier.

The LibreOffice team is always in need of talented developers, hackers, or designers, so if you think you have what it takes, you’ll always find a place in the team. In fact, there are a lot of open positions right now, and you can start right away.

LibreOffice people are aware of the UI

It’s not like the developers that are working on LibreOffice don’t know that the office suite looks like it just landed from 2004, but they also have a lot of work on their hands. Usually, the UI stuff is not prioritized, and there is always something else more important to do.

Someone posted a very interesting topic on Reddit that simply states this: "Tired of the 1990s look of LibreOffice? Here's how you can contribute."

For example, there is already a design team in place, but they still need a UX expert, a Visual design expert, and a user testing expert. Other departments need developers as well. As it stands right now, there are about 1,200 reports marked as "UI" or "ux-advise", so a lot still needs to be done.

The next version of LibreOffice, 5.1, is scheduled to arrive on February 1, but we’re not expecting to see any kind of major design changes at least until LibreOffice 6.0.