Happy International Software Freedom Day!

[Che]

Gutsy Gibbon has a graphic configuration tool for monitors and graphics
cards - finally!.  That alone is worth upgrading from Feisty (Gutsy
releases in October). AbiWord is sort of bogus software, more intent on
strict adherence to standards than usability, but I find that I don't
need to use OOffice that much with the other lighter applications
available (Notecase, Kexi, PDF Editor and Scribus when I need all the
bells and whistles, not to mention plain old Gedit for most of my
manuscripting).

With new users I find that what baffles them most of all, after the
initial install, is the flexibility and choice they have. After years of
being locked into 'doing things the Microsoft way' they find it hard to
envision using job specific applications instead of bloated office
suites and RAM killing graphics apps etc.  But after a couple of weeks
playing with Ubuntu I have yet to have one complain that they are
switching back to Windows. Usually they want to know how to get rid of
the dual boot to Windows... *grin*

Che
(Linux user since Slackware 1.1 - Ubuntu user since I came to my
senses!) 


On Sat, 2007-15-09 at 18:23 -0400, Leslie Wright wrote:
> Bob Chandler wrote:
> > He quickly came to the conclusion that "Open Office" was "good enough"
> > for whatever his needs were (quite simple) and so he is no longer
> > dependent on Microsoft Office!   The owner is happy not to have a
> > customer coming in asking him to pirate software.
> OpenOffice continues to impress me, even in its Windows and X11 
> incarnations. The retail version of MS Office has been very expensive 
> for years and so I have been using an academic version of Office 2000, 
> gotten when I was a student, and have never bothered upgrading. I run 
> ubuntu as a virtual machine on a brand new iMac, and OpenOffice works 
> wonderfully there. Even under the Mac OS proper I find the X11 version 
> of OpenOffice looks and works extremely well, though I understand that 
> that implementation is not as fully developed yet as the Linux 
> version--e.g., the excellent Solver add-in which is a staple of MS Excel 
> is really only available for the Linux version right now. I may actually 
> make OpenOffice my office suite of choice for Mac OS, though I do note 
> that Apple iWork '08 is positively gorgeous and is not expensive--even 
> the full retail version is only $80. What I won't bother with is Office 
> 2004 for Mac. I can legally get the academic version for just over $100, 
> but if OpenOffice behaves almost identically and is under continual 
> improvement and is free, why throw more money at Microsoft?
> 
> Despite its positive reviews and awards I haven't been bowled over by 
> AbiWord. I find that the WYSIWYG rendering of documents has font spacing 
> issues, and PDF exports can not be viewed outside Linux--the docs just 
> show rectangles, not letters. No such issue with OpenOffice in Linux, 
> though I have noticed some font size differences. For example,  5 page 
> MS Word document using Times New Roman 12 will open in OpenOffice under 
> Ubuntu as a 6 or 7 page document. The font size increases, even though 
> the font still reports as Times Roman 12-point. I wonder what that is about.
> 
> Anyway, three cheers for free software! I have to tell you though what 
> Ubuntu needs is a little more user friendliness in the setup. Took me 
> ages to get the screen resolution right on when I installed it on my old 
> PC, and it took a lot of fancy xorg.conf editing that newbie users 
> shouldn't have to endure.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Les
> 
> 
>