Great idea, terrible implementation
Sadly due to its Byzantine dependencies and inadequate support from most distros the dream of concentrating on the writing and forgetting about formatting is just that, a pipe dream. Most people will find themselves spending 10x, a 100x, even a 1000 times the effort they would have spent on formatting their document into getting that .lyx document onto the desktop of someone who can only read .doc files or out of a printer. One "cheat" I've had to resort to in the past is using the Print Preview (View PDF) function and cut'n'pasting the output into an openoffice window.
Given that many of its niftier features like auto-updating menus can now be done by more mainstream editors and its antique gui time may have passed this editor by. It's a step up from editing latex files in emacs but a step down from most everything else.
ps. Just tried installing the latest version on ubuntu to see if that very dubious claim about exporting to word or openoffice formats was true and clearly not, at least not out of the box. Just the usual list of html and pdf options, all of which fail. Obviously my fault for not spending months or years in research to know exactly which supporting software to configure and install but yeah anyone who has a deadline to hand in a piece of writing will want to give this a very wide berth.
