Tom's Hardware On the Current Stable of Office Apps For Linux 121
tc6669 writes "Tom's Hardware is continuing its coverage of easy-to-install Linux applications for new users coming from Windows with the latest installment, Office Apps. This segment covers office suites, word processors, spreadsheet apps, presentation software, simple database titles, desktop publishing, project management, financial software, and more. All of these applications are available in the Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE repos or as .deb or .rpm packages. All of the links to download these applications are provided — even Windows .exe and Mac OS X .dmg files when available."
Re:KOffice 2 (Score:3, Insightful)
This article is the third of five (or so) in Tom's Definitive Linux Software Roundup, and my production machine has undergone a few upgrades since the series began. The new hardware configuration is in the table below. However, the software has changed as well. I started out with Ubuntu 9.04, but switched to Kubuntu 9.10 over the holidays. Therefore, some of the versions may have been from Jaunty and not the newer Karmic repos. Also, some screenshots are GNOME and others KDE.
Its quite possible he did all the testing in Jan/Feb and just now got it published or finished writing it.
But I agree, the article is complete crap. In other words Open Office is the best full office suite there is on Linux, same as it has been for 5 or more years is all that the article says.
OpenOffice getting worse (Score:2, Insightful)
In some ways, OpenOffice 2 was better than OpenOffice 3. At least it crashed less. Google "OpenOffice crashes". [google.com] (764,000 hits.) It crashes on SUSE. It crashes on Ubuntu. It crashes on Windows. It crashes on launch. It crashes on exiting. And what's the support advice? "Delete your OpenOffice profile". "Clean the registry". None of that helps much.
Since Oracle took over, the online "support" is best described as "developer in denial".
The Lotus Fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people simply never needed $400 desktop productivity apps.
The idea that everyone needed to be completely compatible with the market leader quickly
took hold and helped strangle the industry. Documents should have no more vendor-lock
associated with them than image files.
Those of us that don't really need Word, nor really even like it, should not be held hostage by those that do.
Re:KOffice 2 (Score:1, Insightful)
Wrong about that because it also says all of them are inferior to Microsoft Office.
That is an important thing to know, if you are in the market for an Office suite.
Re:Improved driver support (Score:3, Insightful)
What does that have to do with micro vs. monolithic kernel?
Re:Not good enough if you deal with customers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me save you some time... (Score:0, Insightful)
All options are a pathetic joke. Just get Windows or a Mac already so you can run the best [microsoft.com].
Re:Not good enough if you deal with customers. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Lotus Fallacy (Score:1, Insightful)
That can happen even with Office by itself; you formatted it wrong. Learn to use the tools correctly.
And if you want to have predictable formatting, send a PDF.
Re:The Geek's "Retail List" Fallacy (Score:1, Insightful)
The "Ultimate Steal" at $60 for those with student ID. MS Office
Not really. [openoffice.org]
The office manager has work that needs to go out by the close of the business day. He is employing fifty to one hundred and fifty temps he needs to be productive at every empty desk he has to fill.
More power to short-sighted companies that put themselves in positions such as your particularly contrived example making it necessary to waste money on overpriced proprietary software just to get work done. We'll spend our money on benefits and salaries for our employees thank you very much. And as a nice side benefit, we'll put what's left over after that in our pockets.
Classes and certification programs no farther away than your local high school, community college, senior center, or public library.
There have been classes and certifications that supported obsolete business models and practices for long before you or I got here. Fortunately, market inefficiencies tend to be self correcting in the long run. Although, sadly, that tends to only happen after many businesses that hitched their wagons to an out dated model have bitten the dust.
Re:The Lotus Fallacy (Score:3, Insightful)
Etc. It seems like a fairly sticky situation when you start legislating against or for certain companies or organizations...
You don't need to, you simply legislate that documents must be in an open format. If certain companies don't want to make their software compliant with the standard that's their problem.
so which is faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they even read what they write?
"OO.o Writer is the fastest and most responsive word processor available for Linux today."
"KWord is fast. It's probably the fastest-loading and maybe the most responsive word processor in the roundup."
Re:Improved driver support (Score:3, Insightful)
What does that have to do with micro vs. monolithic kernel?
Technically nothing, but I imagine a micro kernel would have a much more persistent API/ABI in practice. Linux changes the kernel module interface very often so it's a lot more practical to have the source in the main kernel and let the kernel maintainers update the driver than to keep up with a binary driver. The nvidia and catalyst drivers are exceptions because they're huge graphics processing engines but all the other hardware is really better off in the kernel because of it.
Re:DIA = Dead In Ability (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to make a diagram so complex that it would be difficult to make it in dia, you are doing it wrong.
Remember -- diagram is an illustration, not a formal specification.