Rubbish. Not everyone sits there cranking out word-processor documents all day, and it doesn't make sense for such people to have a horribly bloated program sitting there all day long wasting RAM that could be put to better purposes.

Let's see, OO on a 1.25 page document with no graphics or diagrams, tables, ... (just ever-so-slightly marked-up text):

PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
5488 20.9 4.0 542068 82780 pts/0 Sl 09:12 0:02 /opt/openoffice.org3/program/soffice.bin some-file.doc

Over 1/2 GB memory image, of which I need over 83 MB in RAM to look at what is essentially plain text? The people who designed and implemented OO should be ashamed.

How does that compare to ms-office?

My point was that you expect all the tools to be available instantly for editing. However, if they had a document viewer mode that could be launched instead... then the amount of ram and loading time would be drastically reduced.

Perhaps you could find a way to convert any document to PDF to view it, then you would save your self the minute it takes to view your document.

Interesting question. Maybe someone here uses ms-office and can fill us in.

It's not clear to me that a viewer is going to be much smaller than the full version of the word processor. It still has to understand the file formats, know how to render text, images, graphs, ... Given that the (*cough*) editing facilities of the average word processor are so simplistic (compared to, for example, vim or emacs), I'd be surprised if an OO viewer-only would be much smaller.

I admire your patience. I think. Or maybe I admire the skill of the marketing people who (apparently) have convinced you that although you have computing power that would have been 'supercomputer class' not that many years ago, you should still sit and wait while a conceptually simple program like a word processor starts up. In any case, converting the document to PDF might well take longer than firing up OO, depending on who writes the convertor. Then you have to fire up the PDF viewer.

Anyone who doesn't realize how amazingly slow OO is to start up should try gnumeric (arguably better than the OO equivalent) or abiword (which admittedly may not have all the capabilities of the OO equivalent).

Cheers

Well old versions of OO certainly were embarassing in this respect but the one I am running now (3.1) starts up fast enough for me to not really notice. You may be in much more of a hurry than me. To be objective I did
and closed (as immediately as my hand and mouse could manage) the resulting application window and time reported that 6.5 seconds had elapsed. Some of that time was taken up with a perfectly acceptable (to me) splash-screen-with-progress-bar thing going on. I think you can switch this off if you dislike such things. Feels perhaps like a second or two longer than MS Word at work on an XP box. IIRC the older versions of OO liked to go have a look at your internet connectivity on startup and stalled for long periods if your interface was down.

They are working on it:
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/f...s/3.2/rc2.html

OO 3.2 Release Candidate 3 was released on the 20th so a stable version of 3.2 shouldn't be too far away.

Hi

I voted for OO, although the spreadsheet application of Gnome, Gnumeric is much more develloped than OO-Calc...

BRGDS

Alex

I know this is not an office suite, but LaTeX is the champion for writing professional documents, especially the longer ones. Even though, once you are familiar with the commands, short documents will output better and you will be happy to see the differences between a word/writer generated document and what LaTeX actually does.

OOo is really the only option for me when it comes to office suties for the simple fact that any file that I am using office wise is either for the consumption of an M$ office user or was created by one. It's always been that way, even before I was a linux user. My needs are modest and compatibility with (mostly bootlegged) versions of M$ office are the overriding feature that I need. OOo has never let me down!

Text processor = Simple
Word Processor = moderately more complex
Document Processor = Expect Delays

Considering that swriter sclac sdraw etc are all links to the same program (don't forget it uses java), I would classify OO as a document Processor. If Gnome Office and KDE Office are running faster than or OO, is it because you are running them in the Desktop Environment they prefer? Have you checked for any extra services, or shared libraries, that my be run because you launch them? Are you testing from a fresh reboot and only running that office software? Have you tried running OO quick launch?

I don't pretend to understand all those questions. I but I can guess that there is much more going on when I launch a program that uses a lot of different libraries shared or static.

Perhaps you have a much faster computer than I do. On my Dell D630 (Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7250 @ 2.00GHz), with a 7200 RPM disk, reading OO off a partition about 40% of the way down the disk (the start of a disk is significantly faster than the end of a disk) it took 14.76 seconds to start up and me to kill it as quickly as possible. Say it took me 1.76 seconds to kill it. That is still 13 seconds to start up, which I consider to be ludicrously slow.

Of course, since Linux caches stuff in unused RAM, repeating the experiment immediately got me a time of 2.83 seconds. 2.83 seconds is acceptable, but even then surprisingly slow given that (almost?) everything should have been cached in RAM.

Anyway, as someone else reported, they are working on this for 3.2, so maybe 3.2 won't be as annoying as 3.1.

Cheers

The first one is the first session after a reboot, the second is with openoffice cached. Got to love SSD harddrives

Edit:
When I come to think of it, I thought I had disabled this cache function in openoffice, so perhaps that's just the internal cache in the harddisk or some other chache thingy.

On an intel Q6600 running Slackware64-current (multi-lib) sata HDD. The first one is the first session after a reboot, the second is with openoffice cached.

I think this is fast enough for me. It doesn't really matter if A is better than B is better than C. What matters is what you are comfortable with. Nearly 84% prefer OpenOffice I think that speaks for itself. go-oo compiles from source fairly easily and it would be a good option to be included in /extra on the next Slackware release. That would then save a 500mb download and 5 hour compile, and then it would be "Slackware-esque", not a hacked up version from RPMs.

samac

For the suite to enable me to be productive, it has to facilitate passing information back and forth to Windows users. I don't like it, but that's the way it is.

Open Office has been my goto for this for years. I see no reason to change.