LyX [LWN.net]

LyX

Posted Jun 6, 2025 18:38 UTC (Fri) by parametricpoly (subscriber, #143903)
In reply to: LyX by joib
Parent article: The importance of free software to science

Unfortunately LyX is pretty crash prone, probably due to the fact that it was written in C++, which makes it horribly difficult to write non-crashing code. I've contributed to the project and used it for over 10 years. Unfortunately the last time I suggested a colleague using Windows to try it out, it crashed multiple times during the first 15 minutes. It has been quite stable on my Lnux, but typically crashes 1-2 times per day.

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LyX

Posted Jun 6, 2025 20:05 UTC (Fri) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (1 responses)

That's too bad. I used LyX roughly from the late 90ies to the early 2010s, and I didn't have any issues with crashing (not saying it never crashed, but I don't remember it to be any worse than other complex gui applications like say Firefox). Maybe quality has gone down since then, if so too bad, I really liked it.

LyX

Posted Jun 6, 2025 22:05 UTC (Fri) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

I have used, and continue to use, LyX when writing papers for publication [biochemistry/computational biology]. I have never had a problem with it crashing. The biggest problem has been deciding "is it worth the time to write a LyX template to match the LaTeX template this journal will accept for submission?". It has been a pleasant surprise going back 20 years or so how many biology journals are willing to accept submissions in LaTeX, even though it may require bypassing the default final-stage submission process and corresponding directly with the print office rather than the editorial office.

Monkey testing LyX

Posted Jun 7, 2025 17:37 UTC (Sat) by gmatht (subscriber, #58961) [Link]

Heh, I have submitted 244 bug reports to LyX. Most of these are crash/aborts found by my Jankey monkey testing tool. Unfortunately, they couldn't fix bugs as quickly as I could find them. I bisected the crashes to find the regressing commit, but working on Coverity reports (as they do now) looks like it would be more developer time effective.

I also imagine LyX would be more reliable if you use the last release of the previous version. (i.e. 2.3.8 rather than the latest 2.4.3).