Re: [tlug] Using Linux for the desktop

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

On Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 12:38:48AM +0900, Thomas Piekenbrock wrote:
> 
> > 2) Windows does come with applications that have
> > become industry standard ie) office, word, excel,
> > powerpoint. Do you know if there site that matches
> > current microsoft products with a Linux equivalent ?
> > If not do you know an equivalent application for
> > word, Excel etc etc
> 
> Openoffice (www.openoffice.org) is very capable in rendering and editing 
> M$ office files.

Humph. Depends what you need to do. I tend to work with moderately
complex documents, and when I go back and forth between MS Word and
OpenOffice, the formatting is *always* seriously messed up. It's also a
horrible resource hog.

Noone would be happier than me to be able to dump MS Office entirely,
but it is simply impossible to reliably produce professional-quality
Word documents in any other application that I know of. Believe me, I've
tried ... and tried, and tried.

If things are ever to get better, Microsoft will have to be forced
(whether by the marketplace or by legislation--whichever works is fine
with me) to fully open their file format specs. Or those formats need to
be pushed out of their dominant position. I'm afraid neither will happen
any time soon.

> If you need to run M$ office under Linux, there is a commercial product
> "Crossover" from Codeweavers,

Good product. I finally broke down and bought Crossover Office when I
realized I was not going to be able to give up MS Office, but I really
wanted to stop dual-booting. It runs Word 2000 quite well; it behaves
just about the same as under Windows, except that occasionally the input
devices get locked into some weird mode where you can't type or select
text properly.

> or you can try to run it under Wine (do not know how good the chance of 
> success is)

Maybe 6 months ago, I tried Word 97 under Wine. It ran, but it crashed
whenever I tried to save a file. In any case, Wine is not for the faint
of heart.

-- 
Matt Gushee                 When a nation follows the Way,
Englewood, Colorado, USA    Horses bear manure through
mgushee@example.com           its fields;
http://www.havenrock.com/   When a nation ignores the Way,
                            Horses bear soldiers through
                                its streets.
                                
                            --Lao Tzu (Peter Merel, trans.)