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Comment by unixhero | Hacker News Reader

Strange, I never encounter any bugs. I am on Windows in corporate land and Linux at home, all good!

I don't even use LO that much, and I'm panic saving in cycle every time I do because it crashes of me so often. Hell, it crashed on me this week, on a 5 pages doc with images, text, one table and a few titles. Nothing fancy.

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?

Yes, no problem at all, you're extremely unlucky. It just works.

It reminds me of my student. Their code doesn't run, and when I get to the machine, it suddenly fixes itself magically. They think they are extremly unlucky, but I tell them I have in fact, magic hands and heal computers by touch.

LO has a bugbounty now, this might have the sideeffect of improving the situation somewhat in regards to random crashes. A crash is after all often an indication of a memory corruption.

That's fantastic news, because that will motivate me to keep the document that I know can cause crashes more often.

I became lazy in reporting bugs because it takes so much time.

Is this on a Mac? I haven't had crashing issues on Linux, but maybe there are platform specific crash bugs.

Most versions of Windows, Cent OS and Ubuntu of the past decade or more, and even Mandriva. But not mac.

You may wish to run a memory test program; it could be due to RAM faults.

Over 15 years, across dozens of machines in various homes and organization? Unlikely.

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.

You must have some bad luck. I use LO daily on Windows and macOS and have done for many years now, and have had maybe 2-3 crashes in total.

The document recovery has saved me in all of those cases.

Document recovery will still lose a couple of minutes of work, or sometimes tells you your files is corrupted infortunatly.

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 :)

Sure. I guess im just old enough to remember the 1990s Microsoft Office shitshow.

Oh, I'm with you on this one. So many scars, from so many different shapes of blades.

That's why I'm still using LO and not MSO, despite the fact it's now more stable.

I was about to post a similar comment. One of the reasons was that before memory protection (that different hardware already for ages) any rogue pointer could crash any other application or the OS. Developing software was an exercise of rebooting Windows. Ah, the reset button!

can applications remind users to save the document once before the autosave kicks in? i was burned many times before i actually read it somewhere. this should be in the quick start somewhere

I've had no crashes the last ~20 times I've used Writer and Calc. I have had the occasional crash or other issue in Draw when working with network and database diagrams that were originally made in Visio, but Draw is already the black sheep of the LibreOffice suite.

I'm on Fedora 34 and LO kept crashing on me as well, sometimes seconds after I opened the application. I discovered that the version I had pre-installed with my OS was some clever application delivery format (Flatpak? I don't remember). I uninstalled this and reinstalled it from dnf, and it has been immaculately stable since. Not a a single crash or issue.

I had the same experience on Ubuntu. Flatpak and snap crashes, yet installing via deb’s is rock solid.

Be sure to use LibreOffice "still" rather than "fresh", i.e. the bottom one of the two version on their download page (which is the second latest, but more stable release): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/

On Chocolatey that's `libreoffice-still`.

I believe that if regular crashes indeed exist, their cause must depend either on the Linux distribution and the combinations of libraries that are installed on the user computer or on the available memory size.

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 don't know, the crash last week was from and LTS Ubuntu on a supported Dell XPS with 32Go of RAM. Seem like ideal linux conditions to me.

There might be even more esoteric variables that influence the appearance of crashes, e.g. which typefaces are used in your documents.

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.

i have a fun one. i like to write and use firefox for research. i am using kde neon and past 3 weeks, on 7.2.5 and earlier, i think from 7.2.2 every often if i Alt-tab out of libreoffice, the app would crash. thankfully i have a habit of automatic ctrl-s whenever i take a break after finishing a sentence so i never lost any data but it was fun to have the same bug for quite some time.

no problems with 7.3 so far

Can you link your bug report about the crash you are encountering?

Can you talk more about your typical use cases? Are you working with huge spreadsheets containing a lot of formula? Word processing documents with a lot of complex embedded content?

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.

Large datasets typically for manual transformations before automating it with some python solution. Works exceptionally for massive CSC datasets for instance.

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.

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