Playing devil's advocate: if Word 97 (or something even older like wordperfect) does all you need, why should you upgrade?
Things are different, of course, when you have to interoperate with other people (in the word processor case, mainly by reading files written by other people); not only do security fixes become more relevant, but also newer versions of the software have greater compatibility (in the word processor case, not only there was a lot of work on libreoffice towards better compatibility with Microsoft document formats, but also AFAIK newer libreoffice versions write by default using a newer version of the OpenDocument formats, so if you have an outdated word processor, you might have difficulty reading files written by other people using these newer versions).
they're the ones I've learned to work with, and since I don't use them professionally, they're still sufficient for my needs.
I don't have to re-learn the UI with every other release, and they all run fine with 1 core and 2 GB of RAM allocated, on any machine
Sounds great actually. Unless I've missed something new, IIRC CS5 is the peak and still unparalleled. Somehow Adobe ruined it.
Perhaps so you can open all of those .docx files that people send to you?
To these people, there are no benefits in upgrading.
(Also, I've spent a lot of time teaching my parents not to open office documents attached to emails, as that has become a popular way for people to spread malware.)
One of the biggest features of LibreOffice over OpenOffice is compatibility with Microsoft Office files.
OpenOffice can open Microsoft Office files but doesn't support as many features as LibreOffice does.
OpenOffice can't save in the newer Microsoft Office formats (docx, xlsx, etc) but LibreOffice can.
Also, LibreOffice now has a ribbon-like interface. To enable it, click View > User Interface and choose Tabbed.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/george-r-r-martin-writes-with-a...