Are other office suites as riddled with problems as LO?

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Notwithstanding @gabix' remark, I'll try to answer.

User expectations about document composition have become very high with time. User now requires very complex things from his suite.

Speaking only for Writer I know best, we now want not only visual variations in text (font face, size, weight, color) but also structural organisation (paragraph rendering, headings with auto numbering, lists, cross-references -- including header/footer capturing excerpts from main text flow --, etc.).

There are only two ways to handle this from user point of view:

• the "programmatic" way

  User salts its raw text with instructions/macros (a markup language) to tell what to do. This is L^AT_EX approach.

• the UI way

  The markup is hidden under a plethora of pre-cooked menu items or buttons. This is the WYSIWYG approach of common office suites.

The first approach offers end user full control at the expense of a tedious programming which explains why specific-domain layers (APIs) have been developed to ease paper writing in various situations.

The second approach tries to leverage access to document writing by offering so-called "intuitive" use after developers have chosen which features they shortcut through menu items and buttons. It becomes "intuitive" after you've fully understood the basic principles they've applied. Unfortunately, these primitives are rarely made clearly explicit.

To make matters more complicated, user expectations increase with the success of office suites and features are added to address new requirements. The main source of trouble is this dynamic nature of specifications. Some new features must be added anyway to keep abreast in competition versus other suites, despite the number of pending bugs. Due to the limited number of developers (in FOSS as well as in closed/commercial apps), there is a trade-off between curing known bugs and adding awaited features.

Also, office suites are used by millions (billion?) people with diverging needs. What is surprising is suites succeed in coping with such contradictory needs and workflows. Of course, this is not optimal for everyone but the result is impressive.

I personally find the case of LO is acceptable. Of course, I'd prefer it to be bug-free, but compared to M$ Office, I can file bugs and get feedback about them. There is some reactivity (of course, I'd prefer a shorter time-frame but not being a contributor I can't complain for a free app solving 99% of my needs), reactivity completely lacking with M$ Office (take it as is or don't take it).

To fully appreciate the "swarm of issues", I'd like to read the code (or some part of it) but the entrance fee is rather high. I have not found any architecture document which would help finding my way through this huge code base. I'm afraid the synthesis document I dream of doesn't exist. Its maintenance cost would anyway be tremendously high.

Another cause of problems is standardization. Many bugs or feature requests are discarded with "ODF incompatibility" reason. Even questions here are ... (more)

Personally, despite qualifications in using it, I have never liked Microsoft Office and for writers, LibreOffice is the better option. It does have glitches, but as I use it I am finding that most issues have an answer that is more about my lack of understanding than about LibreOffice itself. I have tried Calibre and most other word processors out of interest and prefer LibreOffice, bug or no bugs.

I may ask a lot of questions, but I hold that if someone like me who as my ex-husband said, "will never be a programmer as you have not the brain for it," can use LibreOffice (and prefers it on anything Linux,) then anyone can. It is just that people get taught MSO at colleges and never realise there is another way. I object because it is a monopoly that excluded those who are not rich enough to access those tools and yet to get by one needs this particular set of tools to be employable in many cases.

For most people, LibreOffice is fine because they have no need for the stuff where you find the glitches. It is when you do the fancier stuff like using styles etc that the glitches might appear.

(Many think that they are incapable of using styles or doing anything more than making a heading in capitals and putting things in italic and bold! They think styles are a mysterious land for the initiated. (I meet a lot of these people. For some reason they are sure their computer might break if they do anything as complicated!) I speak from the experience of marking many essays! I spend time downloading and installing things for friends who think this is a mysterious, complicated process beyond their capabilities. I keep telling them anyone can. People make money out of making a simple thing complicated so people think they need to be taught it. My point is that Microsoft is a monopoly and people are fooled into thinking alternatives are for the clever or initiated. How many "Learn LibreOffice" courses do you see in Community Education? LibreOffice is actually easier to use. It might have a few problems but the advantages outweigh this.

Anyway, most of the time, the issue is with the user and lack of experience. If there are bugs etc then it will probably affect those who are experienced. I use all sorts of add-ons but my friends are kind of like "uh I better not I might break LibreOffice." "Ooh no I couldn't use a style as I couldn't understand that and why can't I just do what I have always done." They will not have done anything so fancy in MS Word either.

I also object to how those who produce hardware buy a Microsoft licence and then do not know that at some point, this licence will expire. Sometime before this, the user will have bought a version of Microsoft Word. This means at some point all the ... (more)