I bounced around between LibreOffice and OpenOffice for years as I was too cheap to pay for Word. Mainly Libre.

Finally broke down and paid for Office365 when I was struggling to display some (I believe) docx files at the same time my wife was requesting we get it for her work (and this doesn’t even get into struggling to get stuff to display properly for word uses which was constantly a problem).

And man, is it lightyears better than libreoffice. And sure it’s slower, it does a ton more stuff, but if it feels slow to you. . .what kind of computer are you running? I use it on my 8 year old laptop all the time and have never really thought it felt slow.

Wordpad I didn’t even realize still existed. Just looking at it now, I see why. I see very little I gain from NP++ (or I’ve even switched over to VSCode for a lot of things).

I feel like you are making the case for why the only “easy” replacement costs money. The free versions are all extremely limited, or aren’t very good.