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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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).
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."
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.