I moved away from MS Windows a long while back and have ported everything EXCEPT presentations. I still use a friend’s laptop just for PowerPoint.
I have used LibreOffice Impress and it is quite poor in design and the templates are very unprofessional.
I have used LaTeX beamer a lot and I am now tired of fighting it to make simple transitions look good, quickly customise a slide, etc.
Are there alternatives that I can use which are libre friendly as well as user-friendly?
https://www.onlyoffice.com/ may be an option. They have hosted plans but you can just use the office suite with local files for free if you don’t need a yof the hosted offerings features
It’s this or Google or Microsoft if you want something PowerPoint-like.
Many recommend to ‘pick a javascript framework’, which just like LaTeX Beamer sounds good if you do your own thing, but not ideal if people expect PowerPoint. Building slides through code is fundamentally different from drag-on-dropping images.
Pick Google or Microsoft or OnlyOffice and use their web version. This keeps your laptop free of non-free software while using the same tools everyone else has.
OnlyOffice desktop version. It is a tad confusing that they put the self hosted server on their front page.
Have you tried cryptpad? I use cryptpad.fr’s unpaid option and I gain one GB data. Here I can choose between markdown presentation or onlyoffice presentation. The markdown presentation is neat for quickly creating presentations. I can however not comment on onlyoffice presentation because I have not used it.