LaTex is awesome, period. But the learning curve is too high for common documents, which is fine because it was designed to be a great typesetting, not a word processor.

On the other hand, Word is great too, I wouldn't write a book on it but most of the time I am not writing books, as for free alternatives to Word, I find them sufficient but I would rather pay 10$ per month to use word and excel than work around libre office and its limitations.