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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."
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.
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.
What? PostgreSQL? LaTeX?
Are you going to be dictating to your secretary who's typing in SQL statements?
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.
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.
"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.
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."