“LibreOffice? Please, no. We use that thing at work, and I cannot stand how it is almost seems to be held together with duct tape and twine.”
Really? Can you be more specific? What version do you have? LibreOffice has reached version 5 and is claimed to be more compatible with MS Office files, although I have not tried it out yet. Lack of 100% format compatibility with Microsoft has been my only complaint, but I use the LO word processing and spreadsheets at my office nearly every day and find it very acceptable so long as I don’t have to exchange files with Microsoft.
Impress is more limited than PowerPoint, but I still was able to make a major presentation with it. I have read that Base is pretty lame.
We are agreed that VLC is a great program. GIMP is complicated and different from other graphics programs, but it probably has more potential than I’ll ever learn. I use it for the basics, to crop pictures or convert them to other formats.
#14 Someone in a past posted this past month recommended LibreOffice. https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/
I tried their Word version and it was identical as far as output with Word 2013 when I created a test file using tables, paragraphs, different fonts and sizes etc. then saved it as a Word doc. I would edit the doc in both programs and it looked identical and printed the same.
Tables are clumsy in LibreOffice (you gotta use a frame around a table). Much help found at youtube.