I am working on Xubuntu 16.04.2, running xfce 4.12 and LibreOffice was in 5.1.4.
With some system upgrade towards the end of 2016 / beginning of 2017 the problem with garbled text in libreoffice calc started. That is, if you would edit a cell, it was really hard to read while typing. I found out that this could be solved by uninstalling libreoffice-gtk (the gtk 2 version, I suppose) and install libreoffice-gtk3 instead.
This, however, led to non functioning middle mouse button scrolling (using the trackpoint on a Dell Latitude and the middle mouse button under the space bar). So I uninstalled both, libreoffice-gtk and libreoffice-gtk3. The result was quite ugly (theme wise), but I seemed to be able to work productively again.
Until it turned out that I no longer can open remote files (e.g. from nfs or sshfs). If at all, I got the message “General input/output error …”. This was due to a missing libreoffice-gnome (which might have been uninstalled while uninstalling the libreoffice-gtk). However, re-installing libreoffice-gnome also pulled in libreoffice-gtk as a dependency and I was back at the start.
Eventually I installed libreoffice 5.3.0.3 from ppa (as described in https://websetnet.com/install-libreoffice-5-3-via-ppa-snap-ubuntu-16-04/), thinking that this might solve my problems (as there were also indications in several forums on the net). However, with libreoffice-gtk3 installed, opening files was painfully slow (we are talking minutes to open a ~100kB odt file) so this had to go. While then using libreoffice-gtk again, I first thought my problems were solved, but the garbled text problem still persists.
I am writing this to share my experience rather than asking a particular question. However, it would be nice if someone can reproduce this problem or even indicate a solution for Xubuntu 16.04.2 + XFCE 4.12 + libreoffice + capability to edit cells (with unobscured font/content), to open files from remote network places, to scroll through documents and to open files in a time appropriate to file size and local storage on a SSD.
cheers,
Ralf