Going MS Free (under XP) - wish me luck!

Well I'm struggling using Seamonkey Composer in place of Dreamweaver MX 2004 on my Linux machine at home (still have xp at the office). It works but it's sloppy.

Liking the latest desktop linux distros though. I have ubuntu on a machine at the office and SUSE 10.1 at home. Both doing almost all I need (someone sent me an excel chart today that Oo_O couldn't open :( ).
 
Well I'm struggling using Seamonkey Composer in place of Dreamweaver MX 2004 on my Linux machine at home (still have xp at the office). It works but it's sloppy.
Ok, I'll take a look.

Liking the latest desktop linux distros though. I have ubuntu on a machine at the office and SUSE 10.1 at home. Both doing almost all I need (someone sent me an excel chart today that Oo_O couldn't open :( ).
Did you report that to them? Can you send them the file as well? I try to make a habit of that, as that is exactly what allows it to be as good as it is.

I also send every website that doesn't display well in Firefox an email telling them that. It really works. Although I have to admit that I use the IE tab plugin to display those if I really need to. Safe, secure, and nicely in a FF tab together with all the rest.
 
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It's been my general experience that open source software is just buggy, and feels loose, and usually feels like a constant work in progress.

I just dont like the dated look and feel of most of it. However, I will use it depending on how much advantage "free" is in a given scenario.

FF is also positively rife with bugs, and it's considered the pinnacle of open source?
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It's been my general experience that open source software is just buggy, and feels loose, and usually feels like a constant work in progress.

I just dont like the dated look and feel of most of it. However, I will use it depending on how much advantage "free" is in a given scenario.
You might want to look harder. Although most of it is outdated and unfinished, that's because there is so very many of it. Just go and have a look at SourceForge.

FF is also positively rife with bugs, and it's considered the pinnacle of open source?
What bugs? Do we use the same Firefox?

And no, FF isn't the pinnacle. It's one of many. Linux, OpenOffice, Samba, Apache, Phyton, Blender, nethack, the internet, php, phpBB, the GIMP and very many others are all Open Source success stories.
 
Your initial list of programs is what I use as well. Works much better than their MS counterparts, IMO. And I do sometimes need to use those for my job (programming, business apps mostly). The only exception I would make would be MSSQL. Not better, but very good and convenient. And I never had those problems with Thunderbird. I guess your mail archive got broken.
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Claiming that OpenOffice works better than MS one is veeery ambitious. Ever tried to work with relatively big document (100+ pages)? Its a pain in OO. Although I frequently use it to convert docs into pdf :D . And if one needs compatibility with excel sheets... its getting tough.
And 1 reason for using Outlook - any other decent mail client able to connect to Exchange?
 
Ok, I'll take a look.


Did you report that to them? Can you send them the file as well? I try to make a habit of that, as that is exactly what allows it to be as good as it is.

I just spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to report this Excel problem and gave up :(.
 
You might want to look harder. Although most of it is outdated and unfinished, that's because there is so very many of it. Just go and have a look at SourceForge.


What bugs? Do we use the same Firefox?

you know, memory leaks and general instability :eek:
(but, it's nothing like netscape 4.x, it's very usable indeed)
 
I find that 1.5.0.6 does seem to have memory leaks (certainly nowhere near the leak problems of Outlook 2003!) and is as stable as IE. I run it with scripts disabled by default and only load them on sites I trust.

What I find completely unacceptable is paying $400+ for Office 2k3 Pro and having a program like Outlook with a documented memory leak that MS tries to write off as a feature and won't fix. That memory leak, along with the propensity of MS XP systems to simply slow down with age, is why I've gone mostly MS free.
 
I don't actually care for powerpoint. I usually do my slide graphics in CorelDraw and then paste them into PP using PP just for the bullets. I hate animations because they're version and fonts installed dependent. If you use Pack and Go they work okay but too many people want the PowerPoint file and suddenly your animations are totally different because they're still running PP97. Anyway, I still have many copies of Office2k3 (20 or so between all the computers at my company) so I can preview there or - god forbid - do it at home where I still have O2k3 installed.

You can import PP or write your own in the OpenOffice presentation package and export it to a .swf file. You then have a presentation you can play on any browser with a flash plug-in, and with all fonts etc. embedded. Also useful for web sites of course.
 
Claiming that OpenOffice works better than MS one is veeery ambitious. Ever tried to work with relatively big document (100+ pages)? Its a pain in OO. Although I frequently use it to convert docs into pdf :D .

I found it the opposite, although if you have lots of embedded images a large OO document it can be slow. However MS Word tends to crash on me often with large documents, although it is OK with small documents and I have lost data that way. I haven't lost any data with OO yet - although the first release of OO 2 crashed occasionally, the data is always recoverable (down to the XML format I think), and the latest version is very stable.

For a free PDF writer try this:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pdfcreator/PDFCreator-0_9_3_GPLGhostscript.exe?download
 
The C't magazine did an extensive test on Office applications about a year ago, and the only seriously negative points they could find about OpenOffice were, that documents saved as html pages sometimes didn't display correctly in IE, and that sometimes importing a MS Office document changed the layout. Although there were a few minor ones as well, that were mostly about it being hard to find where to change things, like spell checkers or the default page size. Almost all of those (exept the default page size, AFAIK, which still took me Googling) are fixed in OpenOffice 2.

Microsoft Office, on the other hand, had quite a lot of serious issues. For example, when using headers and footers and at least one picture or other embedded object on each page, it was impossible to create a 100 page document. Word crashed every time. And things like multipage tables, different paper sizes and orientations and changing the header and footer often all tended to crash Word and destroy the document after some time. Very large spreadsheets also suffer from that and sometimes lost links. And (IIRC) a html page saved in Word was much bigger and only displayed correctly in IE.

In general, when you want to work with large and/or complex documents, you better don't try that in Microsoft Office.

The best and worst thing about OpenOffice 2 is, that they copied the UI from Microsoft Office for more than 90%. That makes it much easier to switch, but unfortunately that makes a lot of things, like wrestling with the layout of spreadsheets with embedded objects just as much of a pain as with Microsoft Office.

Still, it didn't crash even once during the test, and it does it all as promised.
 
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