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[GlyphGryph]

Umm.. No, not really. Have you even tried Word? It's far more stable, it's faster, it doesn't crash, it doesn't flip your text all over the place, it parses doc/docx correctly, and it does right-to-left paragraphs correctly. I can go on, but I think you get the picture.

This... has not been my experience. I find it runs a lot slower, frequently does things I don't want (nor understand why it does them), and has a host of other problems. It has a lot of features yes, but most of them don't actually seem to be, well... useful for anything.

Maybe there are niche situations where Word is better, sure. But I haven't encountered any of them, and I really doubt most will in standard use. And I've not had open office crash since, like... 2009, once, never had it flip anything anywhere, and had no problem with right to left paragraph alignment (though admittedly, not something I've had to use many times, most for an art project which I was really only drafting anyways)

doc/docx

Also, this is a bullshit justification, of course it parses the doctype built specifically to only be parsed by word better than its competitors. It parses many other doc types just as well if not better than Word does.

[Max White]

I use open office because things are were they are meant to be! Ever since Microsoft ditched the tool bar in favour of that wretched ribbon, MSOffice has been hell to work in.

[ChairmanPoo]

For the record, ATM I have both Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7 starter (came as default) on my computer. I use windows pretty much just for games, and Ubuntu for everything else + some games that I can run without sacrifices in wine.

God starter suck, XP and ubuntu are so much better than that.

Indeed. But it was already installed, and I want it only for games (and this is a netbook, so not that many games run), which I dont have that much time to play, either . So considering the scarce use I give to windows anyway, why bother in digging up (or pirating) a XP copy?

[GlyphGryph]

I use open office because things are were they are meant to be! Ever since Microsoft ditched the tool bar in favour of that wretched ribbon, MSOffice has been hell to work in.

Aint it the truth.

[Tellemurius]

I use open office because things are were they are meant to be! Ever since Microsoft ditched the tool bar in favour of that wretched ribbon, MSOffice has been hell to work in.

Aint it the truth.

Funny story on that, on XP its toolbar still but on 7 its the fancy ribbon thing.

[Nadaka]

Yes I understand that, am I right that it is free? Also, how do I get stuff to work on Linux?

You need to accept that a lot of the stuff you are used to will not work. This goes for viruses, games and other programs.

NOW, here is the good news. Linux has these things called repositories. Most have simple gui's built right into the OS and you can download thousands and thousands of applications and games for free.

There is also a project called wine that will let you run most windows software, though it can be very finicky and difficult to configure.

[Aklyon]

I use open office because things are were they are meant to be! Ever since Microsoft ditched the tool bar in favour of that wretched ribbon, MSOffice has been hell to work in.

Aint it the truth.

Indeed. Though I have libreoffice.

[Starver]

Yeah, open office used to be on par with word, but lagged behind,

You mean because it didn't go with the "Intuitive Ribbon Interface" thing, which I personally find most unintuitive?  (Where is Excel 2007's sorting function?  I can never find it in whichever one of the pictographic mish-mashes replaces the tried-and-testing meny system!  Luckily, "Alt-D, S" still activates the dialogue I want.  Hooray for keyboards and shortcuts.)

Sorry, I consider Office 2003 to be the Zenith of MS's art, and while OpenOffice doesn't look quite as polished, it does all the same practical things, as far as I'm concerned.  And it's as compatible with MS Office 2007 in every respect, and if it isn't fully compatible with the latest incarnation, it will be.... that and/or LibreOffice, which at the moment is essentially the same except that the implementation team is a group of forked-off[1] OO team-members, so they'll probably diverge in some way or other in the future.  Use both, if you want, it won't cost you anything more, except for a little extra disk-space used that shouldn't cause you problems.


As to distros, I don't like Ubuntu/Mint, and am more a Fedora person.  But it's horses for courses.  Also, if nobody has mentioned them yet (still to read to the end of this quickly-grown thread), there are always LiveCDs (or LiveDVDs) which you can boot up and run without making any changes to the system.  They are a bit slower (working more from memory, or retrieving/extracting from the optical drive, on-the-fly) than the installable versions of the same distro, and may need a prod in the right direction to get all your hardware working, each time, but give you an idea of what the interface is like at least.

Some of them (especially the pure-boot versions, like Puppy) let you save the way you (or the auto-detection parts of the boot-up) configured the machine to a file on your HDD (or memory stick) and thus saves you from going through that again next time, but from the POV of someone just trying them out I'd see which ones you like the look of[2], you'd just want to explore.  Bearing in mind that they'd have what the distro-makers decided to give you, as far as applications[3], where a fully-installed distro could have more intrinsically (or the set-up asks you whether you want to set up any or some or all of a set of different functionalities, such as server, multimedia, terminal, document writing, web-browsing, blah-de-blah...

But you'd get the idea.


[1] You may read that how you will.

[2] Not that you can't make Fedora look like Mint, or vice-versa, it's all configuration of some kind or another, but it's more that some distros have different Package Managers, but more intrinsically it's because you may start to need to know a bit about Linux to actually change some of the Look-And-Feel (TM) elements if you were very happy with most of the distro but wanted to add a particular feature that some other distro had automatically.

[3] e.g. for Backtrack, a whole lot of security-testing tools, but no games, even though you could get the OpenGL versions of FreedroidRPG or TuxRacer working under that, even the OpenGL version; meanwhile SUSE might have those installed, but probably wouldn't have the likes of JohnTheRipper or Ethereal/WireShark on it... and no, I'm not expecting you to know what any of those are.

[ein]

Since we're talking about package managers, I'm throwing my hat out for Arch Linux.
You've got your basic package manager, named pacman, and then you've got a secondary one that requires a bit of finagling to install through pacman, but is super duper awesome.
It's called yaourt and lets you install things from the AUR.

[Darvi]

Wait.

Linux runs on pac-man... and yogurt?

[ein]

Arch does.
It's like magic!

[Phmcw]

Linux runs on pac-man... and yogurt?

Yeah, it's that awesome.

[Starver]

Umm.. No, not really. Have you even tried Word? It's far more stable, it's faster, it doesn't crash, it doesn't flip your text all over the place, it parses doc/docx correctly, and it does right-to-left paragraphs correctly. I can go on, but I think you get the picture.

I've tried Word.  I use Word.  I prefer OO.  Stability?  Never noticed it to be more stable than OO (or OO less).  It's fast enough for typing into, and I type fast, even tabbing/shift-tabbing forwards and backwards all over a spreadsheet.  I've very rarely had either crash on me, lately, and when I have had a problem (usually someone ripping the thumb drive with the document on out of the machine while I was still using it) it recovers nicely[1].  Not sure what you mean by flipping the text all over the place, but it isn't pixel-perfect so maybe you're talking about Widows And Orphans, but you can account for that (and you can save as .PDF so that when you have it perfectly formatted in OO you don't have to worry about the recipient opening it in MS Office and getting things slightly differently spaced).  The ".foox" document formats  seems to me to be supported perfectly (not done too much Office 2011 work, maybe that's an exception), and I must admit that I never do RTL typing, but I'd be surprised if a world's worth of users and contributors doesn't include any number of yiddish/arabic/etc speakers and typers who hadn't already gotten that sorted out.  If not, then "coming soon".  In either OO or LO.

I could also go on, but such are my immediate views about your picture.  Probably you think my version of the picture is tinted a little bit rosy.

[1] One thing with OO is that the auto-save seems to be programmed to start, on a document that I've left idle on screen for a long time, just as I Alt-Tab/whatever back to it to start typing more things into the spreadsheet.    However, aside from thinking that it should implement a "during-save additions-buffer" to let the save happen on the existing data without blocking the entering (and viewing) of new information for that second or two, it works well and (even after tuning the auto-save frequency down a notch or two) I have never lost anything of importance.  Mainly because the document has been saved in-between my last entering info and some sod disconnecting the media on me, I suspect.  Word does the same, of course.

[Starver]

I haven't used windows for a long long time, but I never had an crash with open office (in linux).
And well, last time I used word, it was like open office (sometime in 2004). It's only in the last years that, while word got more functionality and bugfixes, OoO became more bloated and unoriginal. Of course if you use open office, don't use Doc format if you can avoid it. Use odf.

Sorry, meant to include this in the last message.  For other people, I make OpenOffice save as .doc, .xls and .ppt as a default for the three equivalent document types.  I do this because while the OO user will receive and read .doc(x) documents happily, and not know any different, they then start sending their odt/ods/whatever odf is the presentation (odp?) documents to others with MS Office and get into the same jam as people with Works Suite (<haaawk... spit!>) installed by default on their machine get into when they send .wps documents to people.

(Had to install three instances of the Works Filter onto MSOffice-installed machines, in the last couple of weeks, as people emailed "cv.wps" files into the respective people.  The job-seekers were lucky that the recipients thought to ask about opening them, rather than just discarding them is part of the short-listing procedure.  I must admit that I take a chance by sending my CVs out in .PDF form, but as I'm going for technical positions I think I'm fairly safe on that count.  YMMV.)

Anyway, I'm happy with the odfs, and maybe I've been lucky enough not notice too much wrong with the MS alternatives.  Save that on one machine I have to remember to File|open with to not open the .xls with the horrible Excel 2007 installation on it.

[ILikePie]

Okay, maybe I did get a bit carried away with that stability part, but yeah. Selected text likes disappearing, sometimes it decides to render size 10 font as size 8, size 14 as 10, etc. Right-to-left paragraphs still have that punctuation flips around bug (MS Office used to do the same thing a few years ago), docx tables show up flipped sometimes, I'd say it's right-to-left related as well.
I almost forgot, Hunspell/ispell/etc. are kinda terrible compared to MS's spellchecker. The stuff the have in Word does grammar checking and it makes sure you don't mix up homophones (their and there, etc.). I also find its suggestions much more relevant.

Also, I don't know about you guys, but love the ribbon. It's got quite the learning curve, but it's great.

Linux runs on pac-man... and yogurt?

They say on runs on kerosene-powered cheese graters too