Open office is my new fav. I ran koffice for a while but became convert when I found something that actually worked right and had the features I wanted. It does take a while to load but heck I only have 3gb of ram. Koffice needs a little work. Keep in mind though that unless I am mistaken... (hmm a change log several years ago) openoffice came from Star which was developed in large part by Sun (one of their first open source projects) and that is a serious head start. Star was around in well... um. I know that mandrake 7 had it, I think. So many years, where did all the drugs go? I know a lot of people on the windows side that cursed Star like mad. The windows version didn't work so well. Not exactly the proudest day in the opensource/open platform community. I wish I still had a bundled copy though (collector's item like my C-64). I haven't used abiword in years. I remember hate, pain, broken glass, blood, electric shock, smoke, bright light, woosie feeling of floating, people wearing masks. But that was hell, redhat 5.2 or something.

zolax the great

same situation with mozilla - it was bad as closed source, and its still not that good - hard to hack on, compared to the freely developed alternatives - but many love it anyway. well, i'd rather see Koffice get the (little) work it needs than OO.o get cleaned up - Koffice is what, 15 mb? and has what, 75% of OO.o's features? i think i can imagine how much easier it is to add a few things to 15 mb compared to >100 mb of code

I vote for OpenOffice.org.

I like Koffice but that was not the question. The question was what is the best. I do like the lightweight aspect of 15mb and I love KDE. That is my favorite window manager. I would love to see Koffice get better too. With regard to mozzila I wonder do you mean 'hack' or 'crack' those are two very different things. If you are looking for lightweight I recomend that you look at firefox. Firefox is a great browser and is quite small. It also has lots of plugins for customization and if you mean 'hack' I can't see how it could be that hard to hack on the app itself if there are so many things available for it. Firefox came from Mozilla which came from Netscape who sued Bill and his band of jerks so I think that supporting them is the direction that I want to go in. If you want a really lightweight browser try lynx. You probably have it installed hit ctrl-alt-F1, login, type lynx at the command prompt. Sorry no pictures though. Just like what the internet was like before it became popular. I remember logging onto a bbs. Back when you knew the guy that ran your bbs and he was trying to get the money to get connected to the internet. That would be how ISP's got started. Oh the glory of a Commodore 64 that required no special cards or connectors to hook up to a television set. How does any of this have anything to do with openoffice? I've freaking gone senile again.
--ztg--
aka zolax the drunken idiot

I use Star Office on my XP work computer just to see how it goes. I would like to change the whole office over to it evnetually, just to get away from those expensive MS licences. Recently I advertised for 2 new admin staffers. All the applicants quoted having Microsoft expertise. It seems to be equated with getting an A+ grade if you can say you know about M$Office. It amazed me the way people just believe that Microsoft is the ONLY option out there.

Anyway, Star Office is doing a very good job. I really like some of its intuitive approach to many things. On my home computer, I run Oo but it is SLOW to load and is clearly showing its independent maturation away from Star Office. For word processing, I downloaded Abiword and have been pleased with it so far with FC4. It is very quick and does everything I ask of it. Oo I use for all the other stuff, especially the data displays.

Oo is okay, but very slow. I like Star Office; and Abiword for a quick word processing job. So out of 10: Oo 7 (slow); Star Office 8.5; Abiword, 9 (for what is does, i.e. word processing).

Just my $0.02 worth.
JohnH

Ive only ever used open office and find it suffices (with no paper clip) but now im gonna download koffice and give it a go

I'm a Slackware user. I love KOffice, particularly the KOShell workspace, so I try to use KOffice whenever possible. But, to be honest, I still have to download OpenOffice to crack open some documents in a useable format, particularly those generated by MS Office and even some in OASIS formats. However, I think KOffice will get there--eventually.

I'm not sure where Gnome Office fits in. In my experience, AbiWord still seems relatively unstable, and it seems to be primarily useful as a tool for opening MS Word documents more cleanly than KWord, but yet not as cleanly as OpenOffice Writer. (To be fair, I'm using KDE, not Gnome, which might explain AbiWord's instability). So once I've bothered to download OpenOffice, out of necessity to deal with MS Office docs, AbiWord seems kind of pointless, which is too bad since it's much less bloated.

My vote would be either Softmaker Office (Textmaker, Planmaker etc.) or the new incarnation of Applixware. Both are commercial, but inexpensive, very stable, mature and fast.

http://www.softmaker.de
http://www.vistasource.com

OpenOffice.org is not bad though, it's just too big.

gargamel