Re: [tlug] Re: Stand Up for OpenOffice!!

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Dave M G writes:

 > If it helps, my girlfriend bought her laptop used for 10,000 - 15,000 
 > yen. I'm not sure exactly what the specs are - Pentium of some kind - 
 > but surely that's a student level purchase.

As I pointed out already (with a certain amount of asperity) I can't
tell anybody what computer to use; I need to work with what they're
currently using.  Our students have already bought their computers and
are successfully using them.  And they (and their parents!) *want*
Microsoft Office because it's their reasonable expectation that that
is what will be used when they get jobs.

I've had a lot of success converting students to use of XEmacs, just
because of PSGML and AUCTeX.  But XEmacs (which is *slow* in my
opinion) boots in about 8 seconds on a typical student box, and in
less than 20 on really slow ones.  And it has features that simply
aren't available in standard Microsoft warez.

By contrast, OOo offers only pain in an environment where document
format requirements are illustrated with screenshots of MS Word
dialogs.  Asking students to upgrade their hardware is just more pain;
IMO it won't fly, and it's not worth the risk of pissing people off.

 > One thing I'm not really following in your postings where you are 
 > expressing that OOo is too slow for student level machines,

I am not worried about "student-level" machines; I'm worried about the
machines my students are *actually using*, and *will be using until
March 2010* based on past experience.  As Edward Middleton points out,
they have too many GHz and too few MB on the motherboard, and it
wouldn't hurt to give them a few more KRPMs on the hard drive (instead
of basically useless X on the CD/DVD reader).

 > is the idea  that MS Office would be faster on an older machine.

I don't recall making such a claim, although others did.  Only that it
is *way* faster in my (unsystematic) tests, on a Mac and on a machine
running Ubuntu Linux from a CD.[1]  Granted, MS Office performance is
a known quantity, not necessarily faster, but definitely less risky.
I also don't remember anybody claiming that it was significantly
slower than OOo in any case.  (And yes, cold start performance does
matter.  For reasons I do not pretend to understand, my students
invariably turn their computers off after each use.  I'm sure they
could be taught to just put them to sleep, but it's almost as if
somebody is teaching them not to.)

But it's other people who are hung up on the performance issue, not
me.  I was surprised that organizations that I know to be tightwads
with less than private-sector computer skills are converting to OOo,
and expressed that by saying "they must have nice boxes", but I have
plenty of other reservations about OOo.

I *do* want the confidence that it will work effectively in various
environments, because we do have a lot of Mac users and a few Unix
users.  I *would* like it to work from a live Linux CD, so that I can
demo both OOo and the fact that Linux can support what people think of
as a personal workstation, ie, something that runs an office suite :-(.
Based on the response concerning performance, it sounds like this is
something that can be worked out with some straightforward homework
(and the extreme pain of actually using a Windows box again ;-) on my
part.

But my tests also show that OOo produces even more glitches in
presentation on screen and in print than Windows->Mac Word does, and
that OOo is incapable of opening Word Perfect documents (which is
unlikely to matter to my students, but what other feature might be
missing?)  6 months ago the presenter was totally unacceptable as a
substitute for Powerpoint.  Etc, etc.  More testing, more work.


Footnotes: 
[1]  No, it's not cheating to burden OOo with running from the CD
while Office is running from the hard drive.  That's the demo I had
available, and it works fine for XEmacs, R, TeX, and some commericial
Linux software I would like to show to my students.