The first word processor I ever used and against my will. It made me laugh, when it proposed a correction for the yet unknown word “Eurowings” – a small regional airline, based at our airport. The correction proposed was simply „Urangst“ – Primal Fear.

Haha. I thought that the Autocorrect issue was fairly recent. I remember using Word Perfect and hated to change to word because it was not able to show the same codes as Word Perfect. Those were the days.

The difference being that you never needed to "show codes" in MS Word. In contrast WordPerfect used to curdle files regularly and people were always diving into the reveal codes interface to try to straighten them out by hand. In that regard, even ancient WordStar was far better. WordStar was also much faster, I kept it for years because of that and subjectively the fastest computer I ever owned was a 286 with 1M RAM. It was so fast on that machine that it had the appearance of responding before the keypress was complete. However, while it had mailmerge many years ahead of MS Word, it could not do stylesheets.

Which productivity software have you tried now on your Debian box and what was good or bad about them? What kind of file templates and stylesheets do you have?

True. Though sometimes when using word today I sometimes have bold text or some other formatting flowing down to the next line.
I never really use the build-in formatting like headers etc. unless I do something that would need an index. I have the same issue in emails and stuff and in those cases i wish I would see the formatting codes. But it is not really a problem.
At work I am forced to use the MS Office suite.

I haven't done much writing on Linux yet. I think I used to use... maybe it was called Open Office or something so this is kind of work on linux is new to me. So I don't really have anything yet. Hopefully there will be some build-in templates because making things good looking is not my strong suit.

These difficulties and/or features are independent of the office suite. But I admit that different programs facilitate more or less the access to the formatting functions.

In your case it will be best to take just a little time to accommodate to
1.) paragraph styles
2.) character styles
3.) the difference between the two, the way that they are recognizable, the way that they are applied, the shortcuts which are available and, in the end, the way that they are defined.

Difficulties that you do not want to lose time with are immediately eliminated.

Each of the programs mentioned in this thread has templates. As each single template is nothing more than 1 composition of paragraph- and character-styles, passing by point 3) above, they will no longer cause you any trouble.

Again I have to praise SoftMaker Office for the intuitive access to its styling features. LibreOffice has powerful styling, but the dialogs are overcharged, in my opinion. They do not make me curious nor do they respond immediately to my needs.

Erm... SoftMaker do not not care for the LANG variable, but have a setting in the program options. Sorry for the uncivilized language in the second screen shot.

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I use LibreOffice. But as a writer who needs to move things around when trying to create documents, I've found the copy and paste functions to be frustrating.

No matter what method I use to "paste", there's always at least one failed attempt before an option appears that actually works. That's why I don't risk using the "cut" command. I'm afraid of losing what I tried to move and having to go though the "undo" process and start over.

Libreoffice for an installed version. These days though with Google Docs and Office 365 through the browser, while not perfect they are more than adequate for the majority of people's tasks. Platform is becoming irrelevant and you can use what you need to, and on any device you need to.

I hope this becomes the standard personally. Platform independent software would be a dream come true.

In particular, I don't see the appeal for web-based productivity applications. With the way the web server certificate hierarchy is mismanaged there can be no hope of privacy, ever, especially with the server's scripts running in the client's browser. Then there is the matter of the data files themselves which end up being stored somewhere undefined but on the remote server's infrastructure nonetheless. Even if that weren't the case, there is no verification you can do proving the vetting of the scripts. With normal packaging for local applications at least there is at least one OpenPGP signature from at least one developer. It's just way too easy to MitM the web applications.

Furthermore, least with LibreOffice, Calligra, or even Geany, you can work with and store the data in a manner of your chosing without losing control or privacy. The only mode for "cloud" storage that makes any sense to me is how Tarsnap is doing it. That is not and cannot be web based. So I can see plug-ins for local applications which encrypt and upload the deltas to a remote "cloud" server, but I can't see trusting inherently dodgy services like Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, and so on.

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Through other people's machines. If this is the trend, you go alone.

After having LibreOffice installed for a while now and having used it enough, I will say.... I should have switched long ago.

Thanks again.

I always use libre office. It is better then word.

I use LibreOffice, but Calligra Suite (from KDE) is pretty cute...

LibreOffice, hands down.

Someone might have mentioned this one already ;-) LibreOffice