How Is GNOME Office Coming?

Clyde has written a nice article over at LinuxOrbit about the state of the GNOME office suite. With all the hubbub surrounding the recent freeing of Sun's StarOffice, this is gonna get more interesting. I'll tell ya the one thing that I miss in AbiWord is anti-aliased text. Staring at that horridly pixelated text is hard on the eyes. Between the Gimp, Gnucash, Eazel, Evolution, AbiWord, Gnucash and the like (no, I'm not forgetting KDE, I just haven't used it recently), the application support under Linux is rapidly making it feasible for a desktop user, but we're just not there yet. And it's the little things that get ya.

Comments

Still with NT on the Desktop

[Metrol]

Oh boy, I can feel the flames licking at this post. Even still, there's a couple of things I've got to say here.

First off, I've tried several times to use both AbiWord and StarOffice to write a simple document. I never could get past a single paragraph. The fonts are just so horribly unreadable as to make using the end product painful. I know it's neither one of those app's fault. Something simply has to be done about how X deal with fonts before Linux is viable for the desktop.

Oh, and I do enjoy reading the "All I want is a text editor", "EMACS is all you ever need", and "TeX rules". I'll give those folks this much credit, the fonts are at least readable there. When it comes right down to it, I fully darn well expect to have tool bars, formatting functions, and all the wiz bangs without having to read some 300 page O'Reily* book. Ack!

(* no offence meant to O'Reily. I've got me a library of them books here)

Moving along here, I've been wondering a little something about the graphical environment in Linux ever since I first got to playing with it. Why are all the icons and window borders so big? Granted, this isn't really a usability thing, but it sure makes those apps look and feel kinda hokey. A good example of this is Gnumeric. Here we've got this pretty darn nice little spreadsheet program that looks like it was put together with children's blocks. Mind you, I only mean to point out Gnumeric as an example. Almost every app running on Gnome, and to a lesser extent KDE, seem to make horrible use of the screen space. It just has a feel of being very blocky. Folks I've shown my Linux setup to have made similar comments as well.

My last bit of a rant here has to do with HTML editors. Why don't we have any decent ones for Linux yet. No, EMACS ain't what I'm talking about either. Most notably over on NT in my mind is Dreamweaver, which aside from being an outstanding GUI for HTML it's also one hell of a site manager. As someone who not only codes the back end of web sites, but also has to do layout and design not having a tool like Dreamweaver around is a serious handicap.

I also have yet to run across anything that approaches the functionality of HomeSite for getting in at the text level. Again, just being a cool text editor doesn't even begin to replace all the stuff that HomeSite has built into it geared specifically for web technologies. Heck, nothing I've seen on Linux even comes close to HS's PHP hi-liting which in and of itself isn't perfect.

I could probably get by for a long while with a less than stellar office suite. What I can't live without is a less than stellar HTML editing suite. There appear to be some interesting prospects on the horizon in development. Maybe some day someone will get enough of this right to actually get me to go closer to full time to Linux. I am watching for it!