Slashdot Mirror
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."
Bah, they didn't review KOffice 2, even though it had been released at the time of writing. It will be included in the next version of all the distros, and ignoring it makes their roundup obsolete before they even published it.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
So in other words OOo is still the best office suite available for Linux like it has been since... oh 2004? And there are some niche programs that can help with specific jobs like GnuCash?
/. crowd. Perhaps it might be interesting on Engadget or Gizmodo, but for the readers of /. , we already know 99.9% of what is in the article.
I really don't get how this is a story for the
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
But by posting this article on Slashdot, we get another excuse to fight out some holy wars and rant on about various random topics involving Linux, Microsoft, Windows, OOXML and whatever you can think of. I wouldn't be suprised if somewhere in the comments people would start another browser war or say something about the ridiculous policies of Apple regarding the App Store.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
In some ways, OpenOffice 2 was better than OpenOffice 3. At least it crashed less. Google "OpenOffice crashes". (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".
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Those of us on Slashdot are unlikely to learn much of importance from the article, but if you skim it you might pick up a thing or two. I had never heard of Glom before, for example.
I did find it amusing that he showed a list of all his icons, including a Kubuntu icon, and then none of the KDE apps had the Kubuntu icon. I guess if you want to run KDE apps you should use Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu? :-/
I was also amused that he saw Lotus Symphony as a replacement for Microsoft Works. (IBM calls Symphony "Award-winning office productivity software".) Heh.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Naah, I got vi. That's all the office I need, thank you much.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I found the GNUCash is a replacement for Quickbooks statement to be hysterical. GNUCash doesn't even come close. And until Intuit ports QB to Linux, Linux isn't going to penetrate much into the small business world outside of servers.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
It has been my experience that 1600 seats @free per seat will often offset a single missing cell border.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
But not the best for the money ... I find OpenOffice does everything I need it to in the word processing component anyway. The office suite costs more than I paid for my computer.
So you send your client a PDF. Problem solved.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Why can't they take a pdf? Isn't that common enough? Don't they show up the same across platforms?
Most people simply never needed $400 desktop productivity apps.
Almost no one pays retail list for the boxed set of MS Office.
The "Ultimate Steal" at $60 for those with student ID. MS Office for $10 if your employer participates in Microsoft's Home Use program.
Those of us that don't really need Word, nor really even like it, should not be held hostage by those that do.
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.
That makes MS Office skills marketable at any age and at any job site south of the Arctic Circle.
Classes and certification programs no farther away than your local high school, community college, senior center, or public library.
Just include the link for downloading OO.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
If you've never run into this between versions of MS Office, then I'd say you've not used Excel often enough.
Unless you're saying the way you "control" these imperfections is to have multiple versions of MS Office installed/laying around. That's not what most customers have, and I wouldn't expect them to.
They deal with the imperfections, just as we all do when we get a file saved from a different software version.
"When you're doing something for a potential client or for a client, having little imperfections like that, imperfections that are uncontrollable, does not make a good impression. That concerns me that there's little things like that that still crop up."
Microsoft Office isn't really compatible with itself. I've posted this one before, but I guess I'll mention it again:
In a meeting from about a year ago, one of the attendees sent out some notes for us to read beforehand. We all dutifully printed out our copy of the document, and brought it with us to the meeting.
Despite the fact that the document was created with Microsoft Office, and that we all run Microsoft Office, there were 3 different versions of the printed document at the meeting. You could tell by looking around the table that one version of the notes (printed from Microsoft Office for Macintosh) arranged the text around a table in a weird way. Another version (printed by Microsoft Office 2007) put a page break in a different place and put an extra blank line between a table and its caption. The original version (Microsoft Office 2003) was formatted as intended.
This was a simple 3-page document in "DOC" format, with an enumerated list of paragraphs, so it didn't take long for us to realize our copies printed out differently, and to figure out the correlation between versions of Word and how the document printed out.
I think it just goes to show: if you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.
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?
The "Ultimate Steal" at $60 for those with student ID. MS Office
Not really.
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.
I'm a big Linux geek, but I'd have to agree with you when it comes to features like "Track Changes". On the other hand, none of the engineering companies I've worked for really had any clue how to effectively use those features.
In my experience, OpenOffice has been great for classwork and day-to-day stuff. I wouldn't get all fancy with graphing, however, since the formatting and scaling still kind of stinks and is crash prone (though it's improved greatly on recent releases, like 3.2+).
For anything more than casual use, I'd go straight to a combination of Lyx + gnuplot / octave .
Most of my casual spreadsheet use is actually done in gnumeric, which is very light, fast, and stable. Unfortunately I can't say the same about Abiword, so I tend to stick to OpenOffice for documents.
Finally, most of my presentations are exported to pdf and displayed using keyjnote / Impress!ve for its dead-simple but awesome usable GLX eye-candy.
If I really need MS Office compatibility to fill out someone's stupid form (which happens often for heavily formatted documents -- different versions of MS Office still can't even share these with each other even with all the compatibility packs), I boot up Windows in a VM (either the free VMware server 2.0 or VirtualBox, which actually tends to be easier to install and works better).
...because every machine has to have QB on it as opposed to just the person who does tha acounting? And I suppose it won't run in a VM either?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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."
True. It was quite an odyssey to get the Realtek 8192SE on my notebook to work reliably.
Worked fine (despite the need to compile it by hand) until one kernel upgrade lead to kernel panics when switching between eth0 and wlan0.
I'm glad the newer kernel in Ubuntu 10.04 has corrected that again.
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.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I *really* want to find a good quality contact management program. By this, I don't mean an address book, per-se, but - rather - an application to help me keep in touch with diverse contacts (private and professional) who, otherwise, I'd quickly forget about.
I need, for example, to keep logs of interactions, so - if I contact them - I can be sure what we last talked about, and when. I'd like it to integrate with my iCal calendar so that I can schedule tasks to follow-up, when - otherwise - I'd forget.
It's extremely frustrating... I can't seem to find anything... and this is one of the very few bits of software I'd willingly pay for, because - to me - it would be invaluable. Can't find anything suitable though...
``I was also amused that he saw Lotus Symphony as a replacement for Microsoft Works. (IBM calls Symphony "Award-winning office productivity software".) Heh.''
Pardon my ignorance, but what is the joke here? I don't know Lotus Symphony at all, and have only the barest of experience with Microsoft Works.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I hoped to find some new information about database frontends, but the first paragraph makes it absolutely clear there won't be any, and makes you wonder why the reviewer even bothered with filling the rest of the page:
First off, I am not a database user. [...] MS Access isn't the industry-dominating title that Excel is. So, we won't be looking for Access replacements here.
So what will he be lookiing for ? An Excel replacement ? Well, that is suposed to be covered on another page.
we're comparing these apps to Access, something similarly clean, user-friendly, and scalable.
So he's not looking for an Access replacement, but will compare to Access??
Anyway, the result is still that there is no Access equivalent on Linux, and that is the main problem I have since i switched to Ubuntu some 7 months ago.
There are several great databases for big and small uses (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQlite, etc.), but there is no decent frontend to design forms and build applications which require a database. I have successfully used Access->ODBC->PostgreSQL on several projects, and I'm about to install Access in a VM for my own use because Base and Kexi are just much too limited (and Kexi kept crashing when I tried to make a query with a simple join).
And such stupid reviews will certainly not motivate coders to build a great database front-end for Linux.
``When you're doing something for a potential client or for a client, having little imperfections like that, imperfections that are uncontrollable, does not make a good impression.''
I agree. On the other hand, if you are concerned about your document rendering a specific way, none of the Microsoft Office programs are actually the way to go. That's not what they are for. The Microsoft Office products are for quickly whipping up documents, spreadsheets and simple data entry applications. If you want professional quality output, where the way it looks is an important part of the product, you're in the domain of software like QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, Scribus, and TeX.
If you still want to produce your documentation in Microsoft Office and have it look the same on different systems, you need to convert the document to a format like PDF before sending it. Microsoft Office files simply don't render the same on different systems - because of competing office suites like OpenOffice.org and WordPerfect Office, but also because different versions of Microsoft Office don't render the same documents the same way. Again, that's not what they are for.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
You make a very good point.
In fact, I think even Dia is overkill. I would like to specify just the few elements that my diagram has in a simple text file, then have that render to some kind of standard (scalable and/or pixmap) image format. Preferably it would try to automagically lay out the diagram elements in a sensible way, so that I don't have to specify positions for all of them. Something like pic or dot might do very nicely.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Office apps, we have open office. Simply put the best office suite in current list of office products. We also have Evolution which takes Outlook under the table and more graphing programs then you can shake a stick at.
Better Enterprise level solutions and there all free, lets see windows say that. (without crashing)