LibreOffice is my go-to office suite for when I need to create a document, and more importantly, when someone at work sends me a Microsoft Office file. So not having it functional is a real problem. In this case it would be running and then just suddenly crash, without a warning or a consistent pattern.

This happened on one laptop, and then after I changed jobs and set up a new laptop I found myself facing the same exact problem. There were only two obvious similarities: both times the laptop was running Ubuntu 16.04, and every time there was no useful information after the crash.

Eventually I was able to narrow it down: it only happens when running Ubuntu and using the Trinity desktop. The crashes happen randomly during normal usage, however there are two ways to consistently reproduce them:
1. Start up LibreOffice Calc or LibreOffice Writer or LibreOffice (plain)
2. Go to Tools -> Options -> LibreOffice -> view
Or:
2. Go to Tools -> Customize
Either way, as soon as I click on the menu item, poof! It’s gone. And I could not find any logs or dump files. I tried starting LibreOffice from the command line, so that I could see what it wrote to stderr, but the only message I ever got was “X IO Error”. My google-fu is reasonably good, but with a message that short I never found anything helpful.

Versions of of LibreOffice I tried:

• 5.1.6.2
• 5.4.7.2 (using the AppImage file)
• 6.0.4.2 (using the AppImage file)

Since searching for the error message wasn’t getting me anywhere, I decided to build from source. That way I would be able to enable debug support and hopefully get a more informative error message. The only thing was, after I built from source, LibreOffice no longer crashed.

So I have no fix, but a successful workaround: just build from source. To do the build I just followed the instructions. I’m not sure I even got debugging turned on. This has worked on two different models of Dell laptop, both running Ubuntu 16.04 and Trinity.