LibreOffice can't start after ugrade to Linux Mint 21.1

[German]A short post from the Linux world, although I'm not yet sure if and how widespread the problem is. A blog reader contacted me last Friday and complained that his LibreOffice wouldn't start after he upgraded a Linux Mint system to version 21.1. I did a little research.

A reader's feedback

Linux Mint 21.1 (Vera) was released in December 2022 (see Linux Mint 21.1,), so it has been available for a few days. German blog reader Martin contacted me by email on March 2, 2023 and described his problem as follows:

Linux Mint 21.1 Libre Office

Dear Mr. Born,

I have a question that you may be able to help with.

I have updated my Liunx Mint to 21.1.

Unfortunately LibreOffice does not work anymore.

Is there a solution for this?

Uninstalling and reinstalling did not give a solution.

I have not found a solution on the internet.

I would be glad to hear from you.

With kind regards

Martin

Well, ad-hoc I am not aware of any solution to this problem. I briefly looked on the Internet, there is this German forum post with an entry describing an almost identical issue (I've translated the text).

after update linux mint 20 to 20.1 libre office does not work anymore

after upgrate linux mint 20 to 20.1 LO does not run anymore.

then I uninstalled LO and then reinstalled it with no result.
What can I do

LG Walter sen.

Since the posters' names are different, they are probably two different people – with the forum entry being from January 2021 and referring to Mint 20.1. There is no solution in the forum thread.

Possible solutions

I lack the deeper experience with this kind of thing, but ad-hoc from the hollow of my gut there are two approaches for me where collisions can occur. One is the possibility that the configuration files for the user profile are broken or incorrect and don't point to the binaries to start. Or a repository required by LibreOffice broke during the upgrade. I then did some research on the internet. If you search for the error, you get the suggestion in this German forum post to delete the user profile under:

/home/user/.config/libreoffice/4/user

to rule out a misconfiguration as the cause. The user has tried this without success. In the LibreOffice help there is a post How to Fix: Can't Open LibreOffice with some hints what to do if LibreOffice does not start. In the above cases this does not seem to have helped.

There is still the possibility that a dependent library of LibreOffice is not up to the expected standard. During my research I came across a forum post ibreOffice not working on Mint 21 from August 2022, which describes a slightly different error scenario after switching to Linux Mint 21.0. There the LibreOffice applications still start, but features have failed.

There is a post in the thread from Dan-car, who also suffered from a LibreOffice not starting after upgrading to a new Mint version. Attempting to start LibreOffice in the terminal then returned a fatal exception error in a runtime library. In the course of the discussion, one user mneiger got in touch and wrote that a complete removal of the Office libraries helped:

I just had the same issue with same error message after upgrading to Mint 21 Vanessa
I solved it doing the the following:
Fully remove any remnant of libre office (and former ppa if ever)

sudo apt-get --purge remove libreoffice*

verified nothing was left, actually I had to

sudo apt-get --purge remove libreoffice-common

Beware, there could be uno and java bits left.
I added the "libreoffice fresh" ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa

then installed libreoffice using the "software manager" rather than cli or synaptic

Everything is working perfectly now !

This being said, I was on the verge of installing libreoffice with flatpak which would be a perfectly valid and workable alternative, although not intellectually satisfyin

Purging the libreoffice* libraries including the reinstallation of LibreOffice has probably helped several users. Maybe it will help those affected. The feedback of the affected person from the above mail is that the fix mentioned here with the purge of the libreoffice* libraries has eliminated the problem.