Re: So LibreOffice it is then.
"No, it is not as lean as WordPad (which can do the most basic things only). Loading time is quite a bit longer, especially on not-that-new hardware, and it times it can feel a bit sluggish...."
Yes, startup can be somewhat long and sluggish, but LibreOffice is a huge program and resource hog. But then MS Office isn't much better in that regard. The sluggishness of LibreOffice appears to be mostly related to it performing a shit load of disk access at startup. When I first got my 2013 21-inch x86 iMac, LIbreOffice took a few seconds to load and then a few seconds more once I selected my letterhead template in its Write app. When the hard drive crashed and I had it replaced with an SSD, LibreOffice startup time vastly improved, perhaps by an order of magnitude. But since then I've replaced the x86 iMac with a new M1 iMac and now startup is nearly instantaneous, about a third of a second for the initial start up and a bit less than that for template selection to start Write. So, an SSD and a fast processor are the key.
"I actually do use LO on my personal machines, it is not bad. But it occupies a differnet niche than WP."
So do I, although I do have MS Office left over when I ghosted a textbook for some professor (as LibreOffice didn't quite know how to properly handle commented inserted by the publisher's editor), I don't use it now because LibreOffice is not only easier to use but it's also free! Free is worth a slight bit of inconvenience, especially when that free product is frequently updated. It does have some long-standing bugs, however, that have never been to reliably reproduce or I would have reported them. But occupy a different niche? I disagree with that assessment, and that is based upon the many governments all over the world that has adopted various Linux distributions to avoid paying the Microsoft "tax" and have installed LibreOffice because it is an excellent replacement for MS Office.
Since I'm a Mac user, the loss of WordPad is not great loss to me. macOS's "TextEdit" will still be there and it serves the same purpose as both WordPad and Notepad (and TextEdit can create as well as save edited .docx documents.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
