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Daemonnews reviews Applixware

Posted by Nik on from the take-two-office-suites-in-to-the-shower? dept.

The folks over at DaemonNews are running a review of Applixware, the 'Office Productivity Suite'. Featuring all the standard components (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, and so on), it's been available for Linux for a while now. However, this is the first time native binaries have been produced for FreeBSD. Read the review to find out whether it was worth waiting for.

3 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Re:WHAT and leave out ed?! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! ed! by Guy+Harris · · Score: 3

    Or, as a wise man once said:

    When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
  2. static link your editor for emergencies by Tom+Christiansen · · Score: 3
    I don't have a "console" running right now, but any old tty will do. Why do people keep focusing on "console"? Where did this word even come from? What ever happened to "terminal", or in geekspeak, "tty"? And anyway, slogin gives you a fine pty. It will even tunnel for a "console"-emulating xterm (that's one that snags syslog messages to /dev/console and kernel printf's).

    But come to think of it, ed doesn't even need a tty. It'll run fine over a socket, too, even if isatty() returns false. It's good for automation, and complete desperation, but not a lot else. If you're going to have a staticly linked editor, which of course is a must and many of these silly commerical Linux-based operating systems forget to do this, then you might as well have something more user-friendly, like, oh, I don't know, maybe ex. :-)

  3. *sigh* by cyoon · · Score: 3
    ... it's another reviewer of a *Nix in a desperate attempt to try to make it sound much better than a Microsoft product. Hey, if it is genuinely better, then that's great! I'd love to see a great non-Microsoft product just as much as any other Slashdotter ... BUT, if you're going to start comparing it to MS Office, you'd better back it up with something that's a good, valid point.

    The author claims, for example, that Office 97 is barely runnable on a Pentium-II 266. This is way more than enough for most people, especially if you're going to keep the document simple. Maybe it is bloated code, but it's still very responsive on this kind of system. And then raving about Applixware's documentation in hypertext format, when Office has had hypertexted help since at least Office 97, with plenty of examples, tips, and quickie-tutorials.

    MS Office is very slick, but certainly not because of its silly dancing paperclip. It has a lot of features which work the way I expect them to. For example, its on-the-fly spellchecking is an extremely useful feature -- this is hardly something that can be swept under the BSD rug ... Oh, and here's the kicker: Applixware has better OS intergration than Microsoft? Come on ... MS just gets a Finding of Fact issued against it saying that it's too tightly integrating its products together ... and Applixware is better? I've programmed all sorts of stuff in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and it's done everything that I needed to do quickly, easily, and reliably.

    If you're going to review a product and compare it against Microsoft, stick to the real issues. If it's faster and quicker than Microsoft at doing the same stuff (which it probably is), that's great. But don't pick lame points. People are so quick to bash Microsoft these days it's sickening. It's called chauvanism.