It must depend on the field. A close relative of mine is a PhD advisor in a science field. He's hands-off about it, but is also aware of what his students are doing. If asked, he recommends MS Word, which is also what he uses for his manuscripts.
My own experience was as a physics student, 30 years ago. Students paid a heavy price for being able to print and submit the entire thesis with no manual intervention. The students who chose LaTeX took the longest at it. I didn't have access to a Unix terminal anyway, and banged out my thesis on an MS-DOS machine. Whatever my word processor couldn't support, I added by hand. The readers were OK with this.
My solution to all typographic problems was "take care of it after defense." I spent a few days after my defense getting my copy to be ready for duplication, including sticking all of the page numbers on with glue because I couldn't make inline figures work.
My own experience was as a physics student, 30 years ago. Students paid a heavy price for being able to print and submit the entire thesis with no manual intervention. The students who chose LaTeX took the longest at it. I didn't have access to a Unix terminal anyway, and banged out my thesis on an MS-DOS machine. Whatever my word processor couldn't support, I added by hand. The readers were OK with this.
My solution to all typographic problems was "take care of it after defense." I spent a few days after my defense getting my copy to be ready for duplication, including sticking all of the page numbers on with glue because I couldn't make inline figures work.