Tom's Hardware On the Current Stable of Office Apps For Linux

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."

No LaTeX, R, etc.

[Hatta]

I didn't see any mention of LaTeX (or Beamer), R, or PostgreSQL. No, these aren't your typical office packages. They're better than your typical office packages.

Times are changing

[dingen]

It's great to see major websites like Tom's Hardware publishing articles like these. I'll forward it to a collegue of mine. He's not a computer nerd in any way, yet being fed up with how crappy Windows was running on his netbook, he managed to find out about Ubuntu and install it on his machine completely by himself. It's quite amazing to me that someone with so little tech-saviness can achieve this. I'm not saying it's going to be the year of the Linux desktop or anything, but times are definately changing.

Improved driver support

[Darkness404]

The main thing that changed is now manufacturers are trying to get Linux drivers out to the masses. I remember back when I first started using Linux (Fedora Core 4 then later Puppy Linux on an old PIII) and having trouble getting basic things like PCI wireless cards to work. The days of Ndiswrapper and painfully extraction various .exes found on questionable Russian driver sites to try to get Linux to work with them are long gone. And quite honestly, I found installing Windows 7 on a spare partition to be a lot harder than installing the latest Ubuntu release because Ubuntu detected all my hardware whereas I was searching for drivers on almost every piece of hardware for Windows.

KOffice is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

KOffice is fantastic. I was using OpenOffice.org to write my History PhD thesis, but then when I heard about KOffice, I switched and I'm glad I did!

KOffice is fast. You don't realize how fucking slow OpenOffice.org is until you've used KOffice. It's probably because it's based around the best UI toolkit available today, Qt, and the best open source desktop available today, KDE. That, and it doesn't have the heaps of Java shit that OO.o unfortunately has stuck on.

When I used OO.o intensively, it'd crash three or four times a day. This just doesn't happen with KOffice. It's extremely robust.

In terms of functionality, KOffice does absolutely everything I need it to do. I have yet to run into any sort of a problem with it. It actually offers better printing support than OO.o offered me, I guess because KOffice uses KDE's excellent printing support, rather than trying to hack their own.

Re:Improved driver support

[dingen]

Yeah, that big old monolithic kernel is really starting to pay off. Today the same collegue I was referring to in the GP wanted to install the office printer on his netbook. It's a Samsung SCX-4500W, a laser-printer connected through WiFi. On Windows, installing this baby means going through a series of installers, which you have to find on Samsungs website. Installing it in Ubuntu is a simple click on a button, as the printer is completely auto-detected and drivers are already present. It's really quite bizarre that out of all desktop operating systems, Windows is actually the one hardest for users to work with.

Re:KOffice is fantastic.

[CannonballHead]

... and it works well on Windows ...

I know, I know, it DOES run on Windows. If you have KDE for Windows installed ...

Re:The Lotus Fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

We should not be held hostage, but we have no choice. AN example of mine from last week. Agency wants CV in word format, I do it in OpenOffice. Open it in Word and even the pages are all wrong with one page spilling over on to the next etc. I had to redo my CV again in a VM so that I have a better chance of it not looking like an unprofessional piece of crap on the recieving end. Until the basic layout of a document is the same on OpenOffice and Word, it's not possible to exclusively use OpenOffice.

Re:No LaTeX, R, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

The really amazing thing is that it took only two posts for someone to completely miss the point of the article and go straight to unabashed holy wars. TFA is about helping Windows immigrants use Linux, not the shortcomings of GUIs. FOAD, sir. FOAD.

Re:Improved driver support

[dingen]

Isn't the monolithic Linux kernel the reason that all drivers (including the one for this "exotic" printer) are included in every Linux distro?

Re:The Lotus Fallacy

[ColdWetDog]

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.

That's an interesting point - you can read jpg and tiff files from anywhere on any system. Even .psd (photoshop native format) readers are pretty ubiquitous. I'm surprised that Linux doesn't have the functionality of Preview / TextEdit in OS X - between the two programs you can read and write to pretty much anything.

Of course, you do lose some fancy formatting, especially with Idiot Word files, but I view that as a feature, not a bug. Complex Word files are an absolute nightmare, even for pure Windows shops. Stripping out some of that garbage goes a long way to making people read the words, not worry about the ditzil brained bullet character.

Now, if you Word users would please go and get off my lawn I'll just retire for my afternoon nap.

Re:The Lotus Fallacy

[jmorris42]

> I don't think that's a legislative action item. It's not the government's job to make sure people make smart decisions.

No but if they themselves set the right example the Microsoft document monopoly would end overnight. Simply forbid the use of Microsoft document formats within or between government agencies or the distribution to the public in those formats. Program their mail gateways to automagically transform Microsoft attachments into something benign. We have an ISO standard now, governments should use it. Then if Office gained the ability to faithfully interoperate in those formats it wouldn't matter what anyone else wanted to use anymore than it matters if a JPG was originally created or modified with Photoshop.

Re:The Lotus Fallacy

[Teun]

The only reason I can see for them to want your CV in Word is that they want to be able to edit it.

Otherwise a pdf would suffice.

Not impressed

[markdavis]

I am not impressed at all with the article. One example:

"Sunbird"..."but with so many comparable Web-based calendars available (all editable via a site), why bother? Sunbird is a pretty solid and straightforward stand-alone app, even if the utility of such a piece of software is in question."

Who is writing this stuff? Is he comparing to an in-house web-based calendar or something non-local like Google? If we are taking about Google/etc calendars:

1) Many people do not want their calendar tied to the web-only experience
2) Many companies might not want to be THAT dependent on a live, must-be-last, always there Internet connection
3) Many people do not want their sensitive data in the hands of some other company (like Google)
4) There are significant performance advantages to having a local calendar
5) Maybe a business wants their calendar tied to their local Email for alerts and reminders, not a third party

Why was this "questionable" status just stamped on Sunbird and not the other "stand alone" apps listed? Why was Evolution not mentioned? Why is "calendar" software considered "Office Suite" software but not Email? Why in their "communications" software article don't they stamp the "questionable" status on all the Email clients?