That is a possibility......

I've not fallen anywhere . And.....since I'm an IT guy I get to test these MS products for almost free. To me it's worth it. To corporate customers....that get to use it and have the company pay for it.....it's worth it for them too

Yes they justify the cost. Yes the features are necessary if people want to use them. Yes they improve the end result, and they even save time. Well, that's good for you. Open Office doesn't do everything that I need, but Office does.


Just because people like to be die hard Linux doesn't mean that they should have to be die hard about "old" software.

Give me a break. Just because I like Linux doesn't mean I'm going to sit back and fake like Open Office is a good replacement. It's NOT even close. It's version 1.1.0 It needs to get to about version 4 in my opinion before it is even worth looking at.

I think Linux will have to get to about version 12 before it is anywhere close to ready for the consumer desktop.

The idea that Linux shuns eye candy and coolness in order to focus on "power" is just
a myth. In my opinion, it's a myth that holds the Linux community back. If
anything, Linux folks spend too much time on eye candy and not enough on
substance. How many web sites are out there devoted entirely to pictures of
Joe Linux User's pretty Gnome or KDE desktop? How many skins have been
written for apps like XMMS, that could use a few less skins and a little more
development? How many bizarre and impractical Gtk themes? How many
pages devoted to dircolor? How many pages are devoted to emacs themes,
even though it's hard to find a decent mono spaced font for emacs (not to
mention the serious technical limitations of emacs' architecture)?

The myth is that the community of Linux hackers battle with the best programmers
at Microsoft and beat them in technical quality, and that there's some mysterious
power buried inside Linux and its applications. It's a wonderful, romantic, David and
Goliath myth. It'd be fun to make movies about it. It'd be fun to believe it. It'd be
even more fun if it were true.

The sober truth, unfortunately, is that Linux and its applications do not hide any
secret power, but rather suffer from a host a problems such as poor or absent
documentation, inconsistency, lack of standardization, reliability problems,
limited, unbalanced and inconsistent feature sets, poor performance, excessive resource consumption, inflexible architectures, lack of high level structures
and abstractions, etc. These problems are often the result of a dysfunctional
development process and/or lack of developers schooled in good engineering
practice.

As long as the Linux community remains in denial about these problems, they are
unlikely to be addressed.

Wow.... An interestng take, for sure. You are welcome to your opinion, sir, and I will leave it at that. Now If you'll excuse me, I have a movie to make.

USE THE FORCE LUKE!!! What secret power are you talking about? Poor or absent documentation (have you ever even looked at a man page or a README/INSTALL file)? Reliability problems? Poor performence? Excessive resource consumption? Dysfunctional development process? Care to back any of those statement's up with something like....ummm....I don't know, FACT MAYBE?

pfffftt.....
This is my last post in this thread. It has gotten horribly off-topic and I don't have time to argue with someone who obviously has no clue what they are talking about. As I said, your opinion is yours.

slight

For someone saying that someone can have their own opinion that is a bit harsh.

I think we all need to R E L A X a little!

It's just a thread, it's just Linux, it's just an opinion

Chill.

-Whitehat

I've encountered many Linux users who, like you, pretend to be baffled by my
dissatisfaction with OSS. At the end of the day, we find we're all experiencing
the same things, but just putting different spins on it. Personally, I feel no need
to play psychological games of denial about the limitations and failings of OSS. As
far as I'm concerned, users of OSS have as much right as anyone to ask for decent
software and to complain when they don't get it. Maybe some Linux users don't have
the honesty to be critical, but I reserve the right to be.

In my experience, Linux and OSS is way problematic -- far beyond anything else
I've used. I won't try to document every problem I've experienced. That would take
an encyclopedia volume. (My worst: the installer for a major distro once overwrote
the wrong partition on my hard drive.) I'll just mention a small sampling of the
problems I've experienced over just the past couple of weeks.

I'm currently trying to develop some software using the Gtk gui library. I'm writing
in C++ and using the Gtkmm C++ bindings for Gtk. I'm targeting both Linux and
Windows (using MinGW). Here's just a smattering of the problems:

I have a copy of Scott Meyers' Effective C++ on CD. Its search engine uses Java.
Okay, Mozilla didn't install Java support. Had to do google searches, fiddle. After
wasting a lot of time I got Java working in Mozilla. But oops, sometimes when I start
the search applet, it crashes X. No, it doesn't just crash, it takes all X down with it
and lands me on a login in prompt. And so on.

Then I have to deal with Gtkmm. Well, the documentation consists of a limited
tutorial and some reference pages that seem to be automatically generated from Gtk
and Gtkmm header files. The member functions appear in somewhat random order.
Not only are there undocumented functions, but the majority of the entire library is
undocumented. (These folks are in another league from MS, who've been pilloried
for leaving a handful of obscure system calls undocumented.) I guess you're expected
to be able to guess what things do based on prior experience with commercial libraries.
The docs don't even get the signatures of the functions right. Members aren't marked
as virtual. The hidden self parameter appears explicitly in some cases (apparently a
carry over from Gtk). And so on.

The graphics functions in Gtk work differently in Windows and X. I don't know
which is correct, if either, because the functions are undocumented. I suspect
the implementors don't know either. That means I have to reverse engineer what's
happening on both platforms and wrap the calls and muck up my code with
preprocessor crap. By the way, MinGW and gcc don't work exactly the same
either.

Now, I need a text editor to do this under Linux and Windows. For want of anything
better, I use XEmacs. It's bad. It's really bad. It take over 100 megs of disk space.
It's slow. It's single threaded. It's buggy. It's not very powerful. Everything is half
done, half broken. It's mostly written in the worst dialect of lisp the world has ever
seen. But it's the best OSS editor I can find, and the Unix community thinks it's the
most powerful application the world will ever see. Sigh. Well, unfortunately, we
have a fork between Emacs and XEmacs, and a bigger fork under Windows, with two
or more versions of each, one using Cygwin and one "native." I tried cygwin
XEmacs. Oops. It has serious bugs, e.g. goes into an infinite loop sometimes when
it's trying to justify text. And when an emacs lisp function goes into an infinite loop,
the only thing you can do is kill the whole app. Okay, I upgrade to the latest version
available on the net. Yikes. The current version can't do cut and paste. According to
the xemacs newsgroup, it's due to a bug in the Cygwin. Okay, let's try to upgrade
Cygwin. Oops, the cygwin installer thinks my copy of cygwin is more recent than
the latest thing on the net. Hmmm, did aliens beam a copy of cygwin from the
future onto my hard drive? And so on.

And so on.

Just like to say, you pick out these small things, saying it's what OO needs.
However I don't see you creating your own version of Office.
I don't even see you heading your own team, telling them what to do, to make things better.
If you're so crash hot, go out there and prove it, don't attempt to prove your point on a message board, because that certainly does not prove anything.

The guys who make OO don't even get payed, of course it's not going to be as good.

For some reason some people here at LQ.org seem to think there's a war between Linux and Microsoft.
Like Linux (Well more so Unix) are the Valient Gold Knights, and Windows (Microsoft) are the Blood Thirsty Pirates who come onto a claimed land, and attempt to claim it for themselves, or vise versa, which ever way you see it.
Don't assume anything until you have confirmation.
In the words of a great man "Don't assume, ascertain."
If there is a war Microsoft has won. However Linux can get up and claim the throne, but there's no way that is happening for a while. Again however there are some aspects which prove how far ahead of Microsoft, Linux really is.
The Slackware installer is so fast, it literally blew my mind.
After using Linux, for even a few months, you realise how dependant you are on a bloated GUI, which can slow your actions down quite a bit.

I was comparing WinXP to Linux - Slackware 9.1 Running KDE 3.2.
1) Yes, Linux has a while to go before it's at the same unstable, insecure, graphically bloated, position as WinXP.
You don't need three hundred widgets for a simple application where 3 widgets would do just good, you don't need a pretty border on an application where, if you didn't have the border it would load that extra 5 seconds faster.
In the times of today, time is money.
In all honesty would companies like to pay $1000 per employee per year, or nothing per year?
Would employees rather have a flashy computer desktop, or get paid that extra $1000 per year?
If I was in a job, I know what I would choose.

I prefer Linux, but the reason I prefer Linux is because I took the time to sit and read documentation.
Not everyone in the world has that time, so until people can make Short, Accurate, Blunt documentation, and flashy GUIs for Linux, it won't dethrone Microsoft (I however, do not want to see Linux distro's with a GUI installation).

Basically, I don't see a point to an argument of Windows vs Linux.
It's like an argument of Grain vs White Bread - There's never going to be a winner, because it comes down to personal preference - Never try and change someone's opinion of anything.

You know, I don't wear a watch, it makes my wrist itch. When I'm at college I usually check the time on a clock hanging from the ceiling of a corridor. One day that clock wasn't working and it was really annoying. I didn't know what to do, I kept forgetting that it wasn't working anymore.
It also got me into thinking about the way we get used to the most unimportant "features". If that clock had never been there, I would be checking the time on my cell phone, like I do when I'm elsewhere. It would be a little less practical but I can live with it.
What I want to say is that you could probably be more productive by using MS Office instead of OpenOffice. But is it really worth it? MS Office is very expensive and it doesn't run on our favorite OS. Do you really need those features?
OpenOffice Calc doesn't display custom error bars on graphs and that is a feature I couldn't live without. But the email notification feature you mentioned, is it really necessary?
It's possible to configure Kmail to display a popup window when a new message arrives but to me emails messages are cool because I can check them only when I want to. I hate telephones with a passion.

You all make some very good points.

I'm going to install OOo at home on my Slack box and I am going to really try it out. Not just here and there....I mean REALLY try it out.

I'll let you know what happens with a good couple weeks worth of just using it and not MS Office

Peace,
Whitehat

Actually, I think OOo1.1 looks better than Microsuck Orifice. At least it works without crashing the bleedin' machine. Now if I could just get it load faster.

My Evaluation of Open Office 1.1.0


I installed OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 on my laptop (in Windows) around Christmas time.

I decided to test it at work and see if I could use it instead of Microsoft Office 2003 for a few weeks.

I have to use Outlook for our exchange server. I however used OOo instead of Excel and Word.

Bottom line:

It worked just fine. There were only a few things that I missed, but I figured out how to put them on the menu's where they didn't exist. I honestly can say that it works just fine without the eye candy.

Heck, this morning I created an installation document for our PC help desk guys on how to install some software. I saved it in Word 97 format and they opened it and went out and installed the software just fine

So.....I have to say.....that I have gained from this thread. I've learned that even though I prefer eye candy apps, you don't need them to get the job done. This translates into $500 that doesn't need to be spent on an Office suite !

I am now building a Linux box with Open Office installed to see if I can get our nurses (I work in a large hospital) using it. I mean they don't care what the OS is as long as they can see the icons on the desktop to click on.

We'll see where it goes from here

Thanks to you all for your input

Peace and God Bless you,
Whitehat

Excellent Whitehat!

Your conclusions carry great weight since it's not just speculation but (more or less) scientific data from an experiment. We should all do this kind of experiment before condemning or praising an application.

Regards
Martin

Have you ever seen that old Mac-geek movie
Winsongs95? (I think I saw it 97) ... It had a
whole lot of songs with new lyrics .... one of the
lines went:

Oh dealer give me one more chance
[chorus]Beauty's only screen-deep[/chorus]
to return windows...
Won't you please let me
exchange it for a Mac!



Cheers,
Tink

On this one.... I got Office XP, win 98, win 98 SE, win ME, win XP, win 2 k. All the CD's. Believe or not, none of them are originals.

So as all my friends. There is no one that I know who purchased an operating system or an office suite. They all including me, got them with the computer or they are pirated.

They look fairly similar to me. If anything, Open Office looks nicer and is easier to use than MSOffice XP - I use OO at home and MSO Professional as Uni.

I can do everything that's needed easily on OO, but MSOXP is very awkward to use compared to earlier versions.

:} I actually found a download-link
for it, people still have it!

http://junk.dawnshadow.se/WinSongs95.mov


Cheers,
Tink