ever since ubuntu switched to unity, mnemonics (eg, alt-f to open the File menu) have been a disaster. 13.10 and LibreOffice are perhaps the worst offenders ... mnemonics don't work *at all*
This ubuntu bug report has been open for 3 years with no progress. At various times, mnemonics have worked briefly with some magic ever changing invocation, perhaps installing lo-menubar or some specific version of LO not in the repository. The bug report is labeled "High Priority", but is Unassigned (does that mean "high priority to no-one"). With 13.10 i don't believe that there is any way to make the unity integrated menus work correctly. There is some chatter online that 14.04 will bring menu bar sanity, but i haven't seen anything explicitly mentioning mnemonics
The LibreOffice bug report is closed as NOTOUTBUG, because someone once heard that someone else thought it was a generic Gnome problem. no link to another bug report, roadmap to a fix, no comment from the 2nd hand source, nothing. way to take responsibility. though in general, i'm all for blaming Gnome because *fuck those guys* for forcing gnome-shell on us and it probably is their fault
The workarounds that are proposed are
- uninstall unity
- apt-get purge libreoffice-gtk, which leaves a horrid 1995-style interface with broken window manager support (ie, you can't maximize the windows), menu bars that don't render correctly, and a propensity to lose access to the keyboard requiring a restart
I haven't tried the first option - it seems pretty drastic since unity is the *recommended* way to use Ubuntu. I'm more inclined to switch to Mint, but that too seems pretty drastic. The second option is completely unusable (and i've tried multiple versions and sources of LO). My current approach is to purge libreoffice and install openoffice (untar and dpkg -i *.deb). OpenOffice seems usable
Evince and some other apps have shown similar issues, but so far i've managed to live with them. Maybe one of them will eventually force me to Mint or to uninstall Unity
tl;dr
As shipped, Ubuntu 13.10 doesn't have a usable office suite, which is one of their key features. I can understand Free Software being buggy, but the false advertisement of claiming things are working is bullshit
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I guess they don't mention "use a keyboard". Assholes
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