Switch the "normally" to "rarely" and that's more accurate. LibreOffice works fine stand-alone or when sending docs to other LibreOffice machines. As soon as you have to interface with MS Office (read or write) it is practically useless.

I have to say that I've produced docx documents with LibreOffice that have looked terrible when loaded into MS Office. For that reason, if someone I'm communicating with really wants to work and communicate in docx format, I fire up MS Office on my Windows VM and use that. Or, if they only want to receive read-only copies, I produce the documents in LibreOffice and generate pdfs.

That is correct. And if the school that you're at is expecting all assignments to be delivered in docx format, you better be using MS Office to generate them or you'll be getting marked off on most of your homework due to horrible formatting errors when they try to read them.

Why would anyone want to receive documents that can be altered?

Throughout my University years, I used LaTeX and sent a PDF file.
Formatting is vastly superior to any word processor - especially M$ Word.

Someone wants me to check a document of theirs. They send it to me, I make changes using the Track Changes facility and send it back. They make some minor alterations to my changes and send it back for me to have a last look over, and so on.

Or, someone wants to write a document but doesn't know how to go about it. I write an initial draft and send it to them to develop further.

Or any other case where you want future editability of a document by those other than the creator.

Ok. Current status report, if anyone is interested:

I used the "UNetBootin", did "Start Kubuntu", did the "Install Kubuntu" on an freshly formatted 750g external hd. Of which, I did 3 partitions plus the swap space. "/" and "/usr/local" and "/home" - these were the correct ones to use right?

It is quite obvious the graphics driver is unstable. When it does work, most of the text and some of the graphical elements, do not appear. Eventually, the screen goes weird, almost like looking at a scrambled satellite signal, the locks this machine up. The version of the Kubuntu is 15.10. Perhaps a newer version might fix it. Looks like it is using "plasma". I am not sure if that matters.

Since I do not have a burner, I found a place that can send me dvd/cds (of course thru LQ.org here). I am going to order a bunch of different distros (Kubuntu, Mint, Debian). I noticed Debain or Mint, don't remember, has a repository set (11 discs), might be worth me getting.

As far as college, the online English assignment submission requires docx so the instructor can insert comments. If I just needed to print something out and turn it in, I would prefer to use openoffice on this machine. But it is true, exporting from openoffice to docx does not load properly in ms office.

You only need the first Debian disk, unless you plan to load lots of minority languages.

So the repository is not a bunch of add on programs, but for dev'ing?

I don't know what they put on the additional CDs, but they're for if you're taking them to install on a computer in the middle of the Atlantic ocean and don't have an internet connection. Once you have bash, apt-get, and a working network connection it's better to update your system, then install things from the online repos. That way you're slightly less likely to run into broken packages. Of course, something like Kubuntu will probably force you to install KDE first.

It's just a matter of preference. I have my entire file system on one partition. So I just have swap and one / for each OS I have installed.

You're unlikely to use more than 20gb (I've never gotten over 10gb) unless you're putting a bunch of games and media on the computer. So a better scheme might be to have 4 100gb partitions and one 300gb partition (in addition to swap). You could put one distro on each of the 100gb partitions and mount the 300gb partition as /home/aubrey/data in each of the distros. Then you could put all of your music and ISOs and what have you in the 300gb partition and every distro would have access to it.

It's also nice to have an empty partition or two around so you don't have to worry about clobbering any data. You can tell linux which partitions to mount and where to mount them later on in your /etc/fstab.

with a less than ideal GPU, i would not use kubuntu. kde is known to be somewhat picky with graphic drivers and hardware accel and all that.
can't you install xubuntu instead? it's much lighter and kinda just works.

anyhow, if you still experience problems with graphics, it's time to post some output:
so college isn't actually forcing you to use office 365 (a cloud based app that integrates with microsoft accounts and whatnot), but instead asking to provide essays in a particular format? big difference.
even so, i find it disturbing that educational institutions force their studens to use microsoft formats (and ultimately, products), but what can i do...


he meant human languages, not computer languages.