No it's just saying libre office kills babies

For real. I really hate how all the internet has just decided to meme with homelander like he is a good guy. Any meme I see with him I just assume some sort of malevolence behind it because he is so fucking evil.

It's not like Solider Boy is great either lol.

I prefer LibreOffice's ugliness to Microsoft's strange menus. Anyway they're also available in LibreOffice, in the view menu.

For the rest of the interface you could look into GTK themes, I think LO's looks depend a lot of the theme you use. The interface is pretty customizable, I think.

I think the look depends a lot on the icon set in use, which can be changed in the settings. Personally I use the Elementary SVG version on my Plasma Desktops, I find those icons to be clearer and neater than the ones in the Breeze pack. Also the default Font Liberation Sans, while a fine font, has a certain look that looks slightly dated somehow. If you change the default style for all documents to some other font, it looks a lot fresher :-)

MS Office is scriptable with basic. LibreOffice, on the other hand, supports basic, python, js, beanshell.

Both software have there advantages. Scientific research is often done on Linux, and they use LibreOffice. In University, we also used it, because they said it has better functions for our use-case.

Yep LibreOffice has felt like a beta for the last 10 years. Whoever makes this suggestion might as well use Notepad, because that's all the functions they seem to need and it's probably more stable than Writer anyways.

To ensure better compatibility, do a fresh save-as to another format if possible on MS side (docx-doc, doc-docx, -docm, whatever). It forces Office to rebuild the file, i believe, and usually it fixes some display mistakes coming from excessive formatting, trashes the leftovers of previous edits, etc, and the file itself becomes lighter. Some other tricks:

1. Have strict formatting rules and only select amount of styles. If you see them mutating, choose to select everything with a style-bastard applied, and then reapply their parent to all affected paragraphs (after what it should disappear);
2. Don't use rare fonts as long as possible, and if you do, on different machines too, copy them from Windows fonts folder in advance;
3. Overwhelmingly long and complex tables in Word usually break. The most dire offender is how you unite cells and move separate cells' borders, because it breaks their structure. Google has workarounds iand limitations on that in their products. To ensure your table translates right, copy it into Excel and then back after setting all cells in Excel to text data, as it likes to reformat e.g. 18.03.2025 into date format and such.

Some of these problems occured to me between different installations of MS products themselves, and with LO I had it the other way: Excel had a bugged file that wasn't adjustable in how to print it. One column wasn't fitting on the page one, but once I move the guideline over that column, Excel cuts this table into 70+ pages, one cell on each. The only thing that helped is opening this exact file in LO Calc where this problem just can't be reproduced. Since that I use Calc first, and then Google Sheets as I haven't found a fitting online sharing solution for myself and get invited tonedit it by others, and Excel is not an option at all anymore.

It works great. Not much difference.

LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and most developers went to work on LibreOffice instead. You should consider switching to LibreOffice.

OpenOffice is not recommended, I hope you mean OnlyOffice, they get confused sometimes.

Isn't Krita considered the better open source image editor now? I keep meaning to learn it.

Yes and yes

For some reason I don't fully understand, LibreOffice hides the option to switch the UI in View > User Interface. The option Tabbed seems to resemble MS ribbon-like style.

They should possibly consider to make that a default question on first start-up, like: 'What interface layout feels familiar?'