At this moment, I wonder if I really need another word processor, but I suppose there is something different from Open Office. I know I have always felt like the guy driving a semi to 7-11 for a coke when using open office. Perhaps libreoffice is a bit leaner.
No, it's not leaner. At this time LibreOffice is just about the same as OpenOffice. Do you know the story behind LibreOffice?
When Oracle bought Sun, a big scare went through the open source community because Sun supplied a good bit of money and developer assistance for OOo, whereas Oracle has not been a friend of open source. Apparently, there was an exodus of OOo developers, who forked into LibreOffice, a community-supported office suite that shares code with OOo. The hope is that LibreOffice will be free of threats of being dropped or turned into a money maker for Oracle. Apparently, Oracle has already started offering "enhancements" for OOo that are not free of charge or free as in speech.
We don't know yet what direction LibreOffice will go in. Some people claim it has performance enhancements already. It will continue to use Open Document Format, so there won't be yet another proprietary format to give compatibility problems.
--GrannyGeek