Before I download, I use OpenOffice.org but it keeps crashing, would LibreOffice be able to read my open office files?
Yes. The LO can read the older ODF1.2 Extended version documents. The recent LO versions uses the ODF1.3 Extended file type version by default. Maybe the OpenOffice can not read those files.
And the LO has a higher level compatibility with the MSO documents, than the AOO has.
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OpenOffice.org will also be able to open ODF 1.3 files; the format was updated in a backward-compatible way, such as old application are able to read it (even those that use ODF 1.0), and they will skip (ignore) the new data present in ODF 1.3 files, that wasn’t defined in the older versions of the standard. E.g., they won’t be able to understand that the page background in the new ODT file is configured full-page (including margins), and will import it as legacy “inside margins” background.
Apart from the branding (blue OpenOffice vs. green LibreOffice), both were identical when LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice in the year 2011. Since then, LibreOffice evolved with dozens of new releases, whereas OpenOffice released nothing but tiny bug fix releases. Both office suites are tailored around the same file format. LibreOffice can open everything that was saved in OpenOffice, whereas OpenOffice can open any LibreOffice document. However, there could be problems when the LibreOffice document contains some stuff that could not be done in OpenOffice. In this case, OpenOffice should ignore the unsupported features without crashing.
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