What to use on OS X Lion: OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice or NeoOffice? I was quite surprised to discover that both releases and beta versions of LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org do crash on OS X 10.7 when you try to access the preferences screen.

I even payed to get a copy of NeoOffice which I was able to use, quite well in the last week but ended up finding an ugly bug: bibliography references from inside frames are not numbered, they just use [0] but they are listed in the bibliography list.

You end up having a bibliography like:

[1] ...
[2] ...
[3] ...
[0] ... (this was used inside a frame)
[0] ... (this was used inside a frame)
[4] ...


As the maintainers of NeoOffice ask a 100$ payment to be able to post something on their forum, I do not feel that my 10$ investment was quite well made.

Also, their codebase seems to be quite ancient, compared with OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. Their beta version is based on OOo 3.1 !?! while now Ooo is 3.3 final for quite a while.

Now, what should I use?!

Update: I removed all the preferences files related to LibreOffice and still crashes after about 30-60 seconds from start while I am inside the config window.

The crashdump is listed at http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=BJVtsKXY
Openoffice is effectively dead ofter Oracle bought Sun -- all the developers moved to LibreOffice, and, assuming you care about future enhancements and compatibility Libreoffice is the way to go now.  I used to use NeoOffice when it was the only native port of OpenOffice for OSX, but since LibreOffice has a maintained OSX port I just moved to LO.

I am on OSX 10.7.4, LO 3.5.4 and all works fine for me.