LibreOffice 4.2.1 Has 100+ Bug-Fixes

[curaga]

There's not a solution that's more powerful than current office suites like LO but not as complex than using LaTeX.

There is, it's called asciidoc.

[DanLamb]

Do you suggest a better alternative? OpenOffice? Calligra? Abiword?

For word processing, markup tools are much better than WYSIWYG tools: Markdown, RST, LaTeX, or _maybe_ in some cases HTML are all better than LibreOffice or Word.

For slideshows, same thing. Some HTML5+JS solutions like reveal.js are really nice. LaTeX+Beamer is good for some stuff.

For spreadsheets, I think Google Docs handles 98% of the use cases of Excel or LibreOffice. The only real complaint I've heard is creating regression lines in plots are much harder than need be. The online storage and collaboration features are hugely valuable. For people doing data analysis type tasks in a spreadsheet, a command line tool like R or one of the R-like tools like python+pandas or Incanter is often a better choice.

Anyway, I think most office suits should maintain a common framework related to file format support and important features. This way, FOSS office suites would compete better to the Microsoft alternative.

I think Markdown/RST/LaTeX/CSV/HTML formats all make more sense than Office Suite binary files in almost all cases.

I use Dmaths for my homework, but it's not correctly translated and lacks many features about maths, physics and geometry.

LaTeX's specialty is math. Tools like Markdown and MathJax use LaTeX internally to render math.

[DanLamb]

But LaTeX/TeX or the rest of the zillion of derivatives are a lot more similar to programming than "just" writing. While I'm very interested in TeXLive and tried it, it's not simple for the average or above average user. There's not a solution that's more powerful than current office suites like LO but not as complex than using LaTeX.

Markdown or RST are extremely easy to use. Much easier than HTML.

Unfortunately that's no longer the case, people are too used to GUIs and get scared when need to even learn simple markup languages like HTML or XML.

An advanced user is really comfortable using a programmer's text editor like Geany or Sublime Text and editing markup and using a shell tool to generate PDF files. The real non-techie audience could never do that. There are easier to use GUI websites or rich client apps for authoring Markdown and generating PDFs...

I'd still recommend that over a heavy-weight "Office Suite" like LibreOffice or MS Office.