But as a user who uses it completely independently of MS Office, just for my documents, the peace of mind I have knowing I am using a powerful multiplatform open source software which won't betray me is priceless.
I know my documents are safe and I can move between OSes at my will. This kind of freedom is essential for me and I am grateful for that
As for the unintuitive UI, it is a complex product that is designed to meet a multitude of needs. In that respect, it is not all that different from Microsoft Office. (If anything, I find it to be slightly more intuitive than Microsoft Office since the means of achieving some things in Microsoft's product is downright quirky.)
I keep reading people saying it's stable for them, but I've was using it already when it was called OOo, before we had docx support, before docx even existed.
And it always has been this buggy.
I donate to the project, I report bugs, I keep advising people to use it.
But still, either I'm incredibly unlucky, or people are just ignoring all the crashes and became blind to them.
Which is a phenomenon I'm seeing a lot in the FOSS world: power users just don't see the bugs anymore because they work around them to easily and effortlessly, almost automatically. It doesn't help getting the software to a better state, nor does it inspire confidence to the new comers we oversell stability to.
So really, really, like the last 10 times you used LO, are you sure there was no problem at all?
I became lazy in reporting bugs because it takes so much time.
I do have a big difference of stability depending of the OS and app though. Windows LO is more stable than Linux LO, and Draw is more stable than Calc, which is more stable than Writer.
The document recovery has saved me in all of those cases.
But even without that, it's more about your workflow being turned sub optimal that hurts.
When I open VSCode, Inkscape or Thunderbird, I don't have to think about loosing my data. That makes things smoother :)
That's why I'm still using LO and not MSO, despite the fact it's now more stable.
On Chocolatey that's `libreoffice-still`.
In that case the crashes are probably caused by bugs that are difficult to reproduce on the developer computers.
I have been using LibreOffice daily for many years, since almost immediately after it forked from OpenOffice. It continues to have various annoying behaviors, which I consider bugs (however less than those that I consider bugs in MS Office), but it never crashes on any of my computers.
However, I compile LibreOffice from source, on a Gentoo Linux.
The fact that LibreOffice never crashes in this particular configuration, does not give much information about how it might behave on Fedora or Ubuntu, because LibreOffice uses a very large number of external libraries and the crashes could depend on their versions.
Besides the dependence on the Linux distribution, there might be a dependence on the available memory. I do not have any computer with less than 32 GB RAM. Maybe the crashes are possible only on computers with less installed memory.
I am pretty sure that we do not use the same typefaces, as I do not use any of the typefaces that are distributed as default in Linux, but I use some commercial typefaces, which I have purchased separately.
I believe that the only way for such elusive bugs to be solved is that whoever experiences the crashes should attempt to create a reproducible crash and file a bug report.
no problems with 7.3 so far
I have been using OpenOffice or LibreOffice for two decades now, on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, and I don't think I've had a single crash or freeze. Ever.
Some financial models, but not often. I am also a massive Excel fan, and do not aim to replace it.
Writing simple documentation and letters with TOC and macros in header footer.
And TBH the different UIs aren't really that big of a deal, they're just different arrangements of action buttons and menus, that is only a tiny fraction of the engineering effort that you'd need even for the word processor part and it isn't like they change their UI all the time.
This is one thing I really like about LO. People familiar with older MS Office can be comfortable in it, but it can also be changed for people more familiar with or preferring the "ribbon" UI.
icons still blurry on macOS retina display. Chronic bug unsolved since aeons
Also due to one-process for all architecture, if one document crashes, it crashes all other documents with it.
I'm not sure why these sorts of things turn into flamewars so often.
LO needs more general QA testing and more dev time invested towards macOS the neglected OS. All this needs to be financed and things are not so easy finding solutions for this decade old problem.