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

[Alain Hoang <hoanga@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> 
> (3) Both of my Macs qualify by your standards for "new(er) computer",
[snip]

	As Niels has said in his reply and my personal experiences with OOo on
Mac OS X can attest.  OOo is close to unacceptable as a real solution
for Office-type software on OS X.  The UI is extremely slow and  it
forces the user to use X11
	I think OOo will be acceptable on OSX when it can claim that it  works
natively with Quartz or becomes Cocoa-ized.  While an application like
Matlab can use X11 on Mac and get away with it (think of the average
user of Matlab) I doubt OOo's potential user base would be that
forgiving.  I certainly am not.

> 
> On an Ubuntu system running from a Live CD, it took over 40 minutes to
[snip]

	I find this a really, really poor anti-example of using OOo on Linux.
My few attempts at running many desktop-like applications from a Live CD
have been as horrible.  Access times an optical drive (even with today's
faster speeds) is extremely slow compared to hard drives.  While you
might be able to benefit from caching effects after the _first load_ of
the application (assuming sufficient RAM which in this case there isn't).
	While I can understand the desire to just pop in a Live CD to demo
Linux in its full glory.  Asking penguins to fly higher than eagles is
asking a lot.  :-)

	This is another reason why I've become wary of using Live CDs as a
Linux technology demo in general since I can imagine many replays of
situations like this...

Evangelist: "Try this out"
User: "Hey, what's this?  A Microsoft Office clone."
Evangelist: "No, don't.... oh well... how about some coffee on the other
side of town?"


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

	How about forsaking one a new upcoming hot boxen (assuming this comes
from lab funds) and acquiring a couple of lab laptops that resemble the
student's du jour model?  Hand them a laptop pre-installed with the
latest distro X that has OOo already installed and tell them to play
with that.  If the laptop looks spec-wise similar their own they might
be convinced it's not a bait and switch (What?  That loaned laptop was a
quad-core quad-CPU  with more RAM than the whole student lab combined?!?
ããããããï [1])


Alain

[1] Okay, okay there might be underfunded and underpowered labs where
beating all the RAM combined in that lab won't be that hard.  Hopefully
it's not yours ;-)