[tlug] Open mouth, insert foot, defend Office.org

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

Roger Markus writes:

 > You should get a new(er) computer (four years old or newer) and stop
 > bad-mouthing OpenOffice!

(1) You should grow up and stop telling people to buy more hardware!
That is not an answer to software deficiencies.[1]

(It is a reason for software developers to not worry about current
deficiencies in the confidence that the problem hardware will obsolete
itself, but that's a different issue entirely.)

(2) Please note, I'm not complaining for myself.  I don't use OOo, I
avoid MSO as much as possible, I don't need no steenkin' orifice
sweets nohow---Emacs, LaTex, and Ghostscript been berry berry good to
me.  I try OOo and AbiWord every once in a while for the sole purpose
of finding something I can use to wean my colleagues off of Microsoft
products.

(3) Both of my Macs qualify by your standards for "new(er) computer",
although one of them only by a couple of weeks.  Macs do *not*
prestart Word or Excel, but normally I can open a network file in
under 10 seconds.  OOo used to take a minute from hard disk at
v. 1.CompletelyUnusableOnAMac, now it takes 3.5 to 4 from a mounted
disk image.  But even on a 14-month-old 4-core Opteron box at 1.8 GHz
with 8 GB of memory (4 GB per CPU) OOo ain't exactly snappy.  Also,
out of the box it was unable to display Japanese in a bulletin that I
receive weekly.  Not to mention being unable to open a Word Perfect
document (this is zettai fukaketsu if you have dealings with American
lawyers).

On the Mac, OOo's font handling is poor.  It also suffers even worse
than Word does from glitches that I believe are due to different font
rendering engines from Windows boxen.

OOo's presentation application was pretty awful as of last March when
Zev and I tried to use it to present at TLUG.  Certainly nothing to
make me want to switch from reST->Firefox for teaching and LaTeX->xdvi
or xpdf for professional presentation.

On an Ubuntu system running from a Live CD, it took over 40 minutes to
get the first document window to open for OOo Writer, and another 25
minutes to quit.  This was on a student's 1.8 MHz Celeron with 256MB
RAM, about 9 months old.  (I assume this had something to do with the
fact that X was occupying 220MB of RAM, and OOo Writer 235MB. :-(
Thank God for mmap(2)!)

                           ****************

For me, all this is fact, and it's a real problem for open source
advocacy.  Based on my experience, I cannot recommend OOo to my
colleagues or to students or to family.  I can't demo it from a live
CD distro on their machines, and they naturally don't trust a
60-second test drive on one of my boxes because they're well aware of
problems even with Microsoft to Microsoft file sharing---only a test
in daily use would be convincing.  For students, who I'd really like
to convince because they could get so much more out of the boxen they
can afford with Linux and open source ... they know I can afford hot
boxen, and they're already suffering from horrible slows from Norton
Anti-Usability software.  They're unwilling to deal with a risk that
things will get even slower.

So what can I run OOo on to get acceptable performance?


Footnotes: 
[1]  I know, Josh.  I'll behave for the next few weeks.