Honestly, I've neither used Impress or whatever the PowerPoint alternative is called at all, nor have I found anything that was substantially better in OO over MS Office.
It's not for a lack of trying--I'd love to be able to say 'wow; I used OO for a month and it kicked Office in the can.'
But all I can say right now is, "It's really not too bad and if you're doing a LOT of work, it's worth the savings."
fwiw, I've been running a pseudo-beta test in our office over the last couple weeks. I'm a power user in the Marketing Dept (and a big open source advocate). IT asked me to try using OO.org 3 instead of MS Office to see how it'd go.
I'm about 3 weeks in and here's the results:
Some things are in different places. This has basically no affect on my productivity, but might do some people in (not any more, though than 'upgrading' from Office 2003 to 2007).
Mail merges suck.
Creating pivot tables is doable, but is even more confusing
Resizing spreadsheets so they fit onto a single page doesn't work as well in OO
I did get a crash when trying to manipulate a big spreadsheet. But it was only one crash...
That's about it. Other than those three or four frustrations, it hasn't been a very big deal. Especially when we're talking about a $200 license...
KDE/Gnome flamewars aside...what's up w/ the original article? Did somebody forget to edit and format it for publication? I had to read each paragraph twice to figure out if it was a question for Linus or an answer from him. Most of his statements, were clearly just transcribed verbatim, rather than tweaked for printing and readability.
I've got to agree here. It was a story that sat somewhere between mediocre and crappy in the reporting quality scale. My favorite line was something to the effect of 'Ubuntu is an operating system that runs on Linux.' Wtg?
You don't have a laptop, huh? Even w/ suspend-to-RAM, you still run the risk of data loss/corruption if you leave your computer on for a long time w/o plugging in, a risk I'm not willing to take while traveling.
Give me fast boot times--I don't care a lick about uptime.
This disk may be the problem, but there's lots of concurrency problems between the CPU and disk, though, too. Install bootchart and look at the comparison of disk usage to CPU sometime--there's a lot gaps where both under 50%.
Mod parent up. This is EXACTLY this issue. People (ie. my in-laws) buy an HD-capable LCD tv. They bring it home. They unhook the old TV. They hook the new TV up the same way. They tune to the same stations. Everything looks weird. But they're getting HD, right?
Who knows? Not them, that's for sure. They just want to watch football. And if the picture's coming and and the TV's one of them HD TVs, well, it must be HD.
18% doesn't suprise me one bit. Unless we're talking about side-by-side testing. I'd believe that. But if we're talking about asking people if the show they're watching is in HD or not and then finding out if it really is, I'd be willing to guess that the number of people watching SD on an HD-capable TV is more like 25-35%.
I've thought about building a TV-B-Gone for that very reason. TV sucks me in. It has less to do with the visual stimulation/ADD/whatever and more to do with the fact that "It's a TV! It's on! Watch it! That's why it's on!!"
I don't watch TV much normally. So when I do, I WATCH it.
Which doesn't necessarily make for good dinner conversation.
Can somebody recommend a good distro, then, that's a good balance of ease of use vs. speed/performance? Ubuntu has always felt bloated and unsnappy to me, no matter what hardware I run it on, but I'm too much of a noob (and too lazy) to do anything too different--it does make a lot of things that are difficult on other machines really easy.
Anybody got any suggestions on a different distro to try?
I was unemployed for about 3 months a couple years ago. When I wasn't on the phone, at an interview or writing a resume, I was teaching myself to program, trying to make MYSELF more valuable to potential employers.
If I was to lose my job now, I'd jump right back on that train. If I already had programming chops, I'd work my butt off on the highest profile open source project I could get in on, knowing that by doing so, I'm getting great experience and building my resume with credible stuff.
Even though I'm not getting paid for it, I'm still increasing my value to potenial employers.
Sounds like just the opposite of what tfa said would happen.
In my experience, unemployed non-dead-beat types work as hard or harder than when they're employed. They know that's the only way to get a the label dead-beat. The OP seems to think that when you lose your job, you end up being a lazy butt who'll sit around in a bread line in a pair of coveralls with a bent cigarrette hanging out of your mouth.
I whole-heartedly concur. And would add, as a twist of the knife, that Wikipedia, as a stand-in for the entire internet, reveals how difficult it is to know whether or not what you're reading (on screen or on paper) is factual or not.
Hopefully, within a generation, our internal fact-checker/skepticism meters will be more healthily developed.
sweet! a real honest-to-God KDE vs. Gnome flame war! everybody's been so nice about the two recently, I started to think people were just joking about the flaming.
Now let me filter out the only message: they're all about the same. Ext3 or xfs or whatever will work just fine. ZFS was given, by God, to Sun. It's amazing. You can't have it.
How much of the flame war on this thread was incited by the purposefully inflammatory summary? Can somebody explain to me again how purposefully frustrating/mocking people about their deeply held beliefs is a good idea and whether you expected anything besides a flame war over it?
People complain about fundamentalist, but isn't this just making it worse?
I think programming is fun when you're creating something you'd like to see available, when you're accomplishing something either worthwhile or fun.
I can spend enjoyable time on projects that seem like they'll be good tools when they're done. I have a lot harder time staying interested when the end goal is something else somebody else made up and told me to put together.
so I'd say the answer is: what's your son interested in? web technology? kernel development? game? help him find the starting point for whatever, and encourage him to think up achievable first projects. From there, it sucks 'em in.
I was just trying to come up with examples of wooden-faced actors. Try pondering while refusing to move any muscles in your face...yeah, that's the expression they all have in common.
I'm with you. This movie was NOT brilliant. It was good. But no where close to brilliant. Heath Ledger was good. But not brilliant. Christian Bale is a better actor than Keanu Reeves or Kevin Costner. Not brilliant.
I think OSX is gaining a lot of ground because the installation of apps is trivial: drag the thing from the disk-image file to your app folder. Of course its almost as easy in ubuntu, where you select from a pre-defined list. But linux definitely needs a common mechanism. RPMs, apt, and yum simply don't hack it.
Wait. You're saying google for a solution, finding a.dmg from wherever on the intertubes (after paying probably $20+), mounting it as a drive, opening your aps folder, opening the.dmg, dragging the ap file into the aps folder, closing the.dmg, unmounting it and trashing it is easier than opening synaptic, typing in general idea of your problem, ticking a box and clicking 'apply' like you do in Synaptic?
Seriously?
Honestly, installing software was one of my biggest beefs with OS X. You have to mount a file as a drive? And installing software is one of my biggest joys with Ubuntu and its variants--it's one of the few things that's substantially better than the competitors.
OS X's way of installing software is far from trivial--it's about two or three times more involved, and unnecessarily confusing than Linux (or rather, Debian) or Windows.
I'm not making any comments about nonDebian installers--things start to fall apart fast.
Slashdot Mirror
If I get bored tonight (doubtful), I may give it a go.
Anybody tried installing the hp repos and packages on a normal Ubuntu install yet?
You must have some GIGANTIC deer around there. Holy crap.
It's not for a lack of trying--I'd love to be able to say 'wow; I used OO for a month and it kicked Office in the can.'
But all I can say right now is, "It's really not too bad and if you're doing a LOT of work, it's worth the savings."
I'm about 3 weeks in and here's the results:
That's about it. Other than those three or four frustrations, it hasn't been a very big deal. Especially when we're talking about a $200 license...
From tfa: "And for the last few years, it has been Fedora," he reveals."
That's the revelation?
Move along. Nothing to see here.
Bad reporting. Bad headline. Next please.
I've got to agree here. It was a story that sat somewhere between mediocre and crappy in the reporting quality scale. My favorite line was something to the effect of 'Ubuntu is an operating system that runs on Linux.' Wtg?
Give me fast boot times--I don't care a lick about uptime.
This disk may be the problem, but there's lots of concurrency problems between the CPU and disk, though, too. Install bootchart and look at the comparison of disk usage to CPU sometime--there's a lot gaps where both under 50%.
Who knows? Not them, that's for sure. They just want to watch football. And if the picture's coming and and the TV's one of them HD TVs, well, it must be HD.
18% doesn't suprise me one bit. Unless we're talking about side-by-side testing. I'd believe that. But if we're talking about asking people if the show they're watching is in HD or not and then finding out if it really is, I'd be willing to guess that the number of people watching SD on an HD-capable TV is more like 25-35%.
I don't watch TV much normally. So when I do, I WATCH it.
Which doesn't necessarily make for good dinner conversation.
Anybody got any suggestions on a different distro to try?
I was unemployed for about 3 months a couple years ago. When I wasn't on the phone, at an interview or writing a resume, I was teaching myself to program, trying to make MYSELF more valuable to potential employers.
If I was to lose my job now, I'd jump right back on that train. If I already had programming chops, I'd work my butt off on the highest profile open source project I could get in on, knowing that by doing so, I'm getting great experience and building my resume with credible stuff.
Even though I'm not getting paid for it, I'm still increasing my value to potenial employers.
Sounds like just the opposite of what tfa said would happen.
In my experience, unemployed non-dead-beat types work as hard or harder than when they're employed. They know that's the only way to get a the label dead-beat. The OP seems to think that when you lose your job, you end up being a lazy butt who'll sit around in a bread line in a pair of coveralls with a bent cigarrette hanging out of your mouth.
Hopefully, within a generation, our internal fact-checker/skepticism meters will be more healthily developed.
mod parent up. My thoughts exactly.
I just finished Everything. Fine DFW work--a little bit headspinning, but funny and thought-provoking. I've got to say, this is a sad day for all.
good to know reality is back in style ;)
I like filesystem x. Why not use it?
Now let me filter out the only message: they're all about the same. Ext3 or xfs or whatever will work just fine. ZFS was given, by God, to Sun. It's amazing. You can't have it.
People complain about fundamentalist, but isn't this just making it worse?
citation needed.
I can spend enjoyable time on projects that seem like they'll be good tools when they're done. I have a lot harder time staying interested when the end goal is something else somebody else made up and told me to put together.
so I'd say the answer is: what's your son interested in? web technology? kernel development? game? help him find the starting point for whatever, and encourage him to think up achievable first projects. From there, it sucks 'em in.
I was just trying to come up with examples of wooden-faced actors. Try pondering while refusing to move any muscles in your face...yeah, that's the expression they all have in common.
Summary: Good. Not brilliant.
I think OSX is gaining a lot of ground because the installation of apps is trivial: drag the thing from the disk-image file to your app folder. Of course its almost as easy in ubuntu, where you select from a pre-defined list. But linux definitely needs a common mechanism. RPMs, apt, and yum simply don't hack it.
Wait. You're saying google for a solution, finding a .dmg from wherever on the intertubes (after paying probably $20+), mounting it as a drive, opening your aps folder, opening the .dmg, dragging the ap file into the aps folder, closing the .dmg, unmounting it and trashing it is easier than opening synaptic, typing in general idea of your problem, ticking a box and clicking 'apply' like you do in Synaptic?
Seriously?
Honestly, installing software was one of my biggest beefs with OS X. You have to mount a file as a drive? And installing software is one of my biggest joys with Ubuntu and its variants--it's one of the few things that's substantially better than the competitors.
OS X's way of installing software is far from trivial--it's about two or three times more involved, and unnecessarily confusing than Linux (or rather, Debian) or Windows.
I'm not making any comments about nonDebian installers--things start to fall apart fast.