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mattyb · Mar 3, 2009, 08:09 AM

... and going Open Office. By the end of March.

ajprice · Mar 3, 2009, 08:14 AM

On which OS?

Railroader · Mar 3, 2009, 08:18 AM

About the only thing worse than Office is Open Office.

mattyb · Mar 3, 2009, 08:18 AM

Windows XP. Vista isn't even being looked at.

ajprice · Mar 3, 2009, 08:34 AM

Originally Posted by Railroader

About the only thing worse than Office is Open Office.

I wouldn't know about Office v OpenOffice, but at least OpenOffice doesn't cost $$$

mattyb · Mar 3, 2009, 08:47 AM

Think that it might also be the fact that we're being sued by MS.

Next in line to sue is is Oracle - we pay them about 10% of what we should for what we actually use.

starman · Mar 3, 2009, 09:11 AM

Originally Posted by ajprice

I wouldn't know about Office v OpenOffice, but at least OpenOffice doesn't cost $$$

You get what you pay for.

Phileas · Mar 3, 2009, 11:00 AM

MS Office free since the beginning of the year. iWork works fine for us.

Spheric Harlot · Mar 3, 2009, 05:52 PM

Originally Posted by Railroader

About the only thing worse than Office is Open Office.

You haven't used Office 2008, obviously.

I hear 2007 is even worse than 2008.

Laminar · Mar 3, 2009, 06:32 PM

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

You haven't used Office 2008, obviously.

I hear 2007 is even worse than 2008.

From a user interface standpoint, 2007 isn't necessarily worse, just completely different, which could be worse or could be better. 2008 is definitely worse - even though it's Intel-native, it's significantly SLOWER than 2004, and definitely more buggy. Complete POS of a software suite.

lexapro · Mar 3, 2009, 07:57 PM

What about things like StarOffice and AbiWord?

Railroader · Mar 3, 2009, 08:01 PM

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

You haven't used Office 2008, obviously.

I hear 2007 is even worse than 2008.

I have not used 2008. I am stuck at 2004 and have been forced to use Open Office a few times. I LOATE Open Office. It is like using something designed by LINUX programmers.

Hg2491 · Mar 3, 2009, 09:29 PM

Google Docs, FTW! Just kidding

I've used Open Office before, and didn't really like it. It feels as if it's out of place, don't know if you guys understand what I mean.

Originally Posted by Railroader

It is like using something designed by LINUX programmers.

You think it's not? It's comes with every Ubuntu distribution, don't know if others.

Chuckit · Mar 3, 2009, 09:40 PM

Originally Posted by Railroader

About the only thing worse than Office is Open Office.

I'd say they're roughly equal. One of my computers has real Office and the other has OpenOffice and I don't really enjoy either.

Sarc · Mar 4, 2009, 12:34 AM

Recently a big NGO over here moved to Ubuntu+OO.o+Google Apps for mail with great succes, saving thousands of dollars in the process. Clearly we are getting closer to the point where Linux, and FOSS in general, becomes competitive in the workplace and not just in the server space.

starman · Mar 4, 2009, 12:41 AM

Originally Posted by Sarc

Clearly we are getting closer to the point where Linux, and FOSS in general, becomes competitive in the workplace and not just in the server space.

How is that "clear"? Just because one open source nutjob Jedi mind tricks the company to dump MS and get Linux?

There's a lot more we need to know before this is "clear".

- - e r i k - - · Mar 4, 2009, 01:03 AM

Originally Posted by starman

you get what you pay for.

qft™

Sarc · Mar 4, 2009, 01:12 AM

Originally Posted by starman

How is that "clear"? Just because one open source nutjob Jedi mind tricks the company to dump MS and get Linux?

There's a lot more we need to know before this is "clear".

My bad, it required some more explaining indeed.
This NGO is a charity, and the employees are not the most qualified computer users. On the other hand the IT staff is far from being Linux Jedi, in fact, the head of IT had to research a lot to get to know linux before he could train his people so they could do the migration.

Anyway, they migrated 100+ PC's to Ubuntu and encountered little trouble doing so. Then they trained the other employees in the main differences between Win+Office and Ubuntu+OO.o.

So far they have encountered problems mostly with Spreadsheet, in that the functions and menu items the employees where used to are located elsewhere.

IMHO, migrating 100+ systems, with multiple hardware configurations, with little trouble is in itself a strong sign that -at least Ubuntu- is getting a lot closer to becoming a commonplace OS. Everything starts by getting the OS into the computer, right ?

Railroader · Mar 4, 2009, 08:24 AM

Originally Posted by Hg2491

You think it's not? It's comes with every Ubuntu distribution, don't know if others.

I was using a literary device called "sarcasm".

OreoCookie · Mar 4, 2009, 10:36 AM

Originally Posted by Railroader

About the only thing worse than Office is Open Office.

Open Office is more consistent with long documents and images than Word is. Not great, but not a total nightmare either. The best thing is that you can convert to pdf which `freezes' all elements. (With Word and ODF files, they are re-interpreted every time they are loaded and images may jump at any point in time

)

Spheric Harlot · Mar 4, 2009, 10:37 AM

Originally Posted by starman

You get what you pay for.

I'm sorry, but in the case of Microsoft Office, this is utterly, utterly incorrect: The time you spend wading through their bullshit is roughly equal in value to what you pay for their software - meaning THEY should be paying YOU.

Eug · Mar 4, 2009, 10:56 AM

Originally Posted by Railroader

About the only thing worse than Office is Open Office.

Yup.

The best (and I use that word loosely) version of Office for the Mac is 2004 with the docx update. I only have 2008 on one machine at the moment, but I'm considering uninstalling it and reverting back to 2004 now that docx support for it is available. Despite being Intel native, as mentioned 2008 is actually slower than 2004 on an Intel machine, and 2008 on a PowerPC machine is utterly painful.

starman · Mar 4, 2009, 11:46 AM

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

I'm sorry, but in the case of Microsoft Office, this is utterly, utterly incorrect: The time you spend wading through their bullshit is roughly equal in value to what you pay for their software - meaning THEY should be paying YOU.

No, YOU are incorrect. I'm no MS Office fanboy by any means, but open source software SUCKS. The only few things that don't break consistently are Apache and a few well-known, well-supported projects. Businesses DEPEND on things working, and when something breaks, it needs to be fixed. Most businesses don't have programmers on call to fix OSS when it breaks, so who answers for the project's problems? There's no monetary incentive so people fix it when they lazily get around to it, if ever.

I'd really like to know what "their bullshit" is. You haven't answered that.

Hg2491 · Mar 4, 2009, 11:50 AM

Originally Posted by Railroader

I was using a literary device called "sarcasm".

I don't usually pick up sarcasm that well, especially on Romantic poems.

But jokes aside, not all Linux programs are as clumsy as Open Office.

starman · Mar 4, 2009, 12:03 PM

Originally Posted by Hg2491

I don't usually pick up sarcasm that well, especially on Romantic poems.

But jokes aside, not all Linux programs are as clumsy as Open Office.

Name one.

Laminar · Mar 4, 2009, 12:29 PM

Chess is pretty stable.

Spheric Harlot · Mar 4, 2009, 02:35 PM

Originally Posted by starman

No, YOU are incorrect. I'm no MS Office fanboy by any means, but open source software SUCKS. The only few things that don't break consistently are Apache and a few well-known, well-supported projects. Businesses DEPEND on things working, and when something breaks, it needs to be fixed. Most businesses don't have programmers on call to fix OSS when it breaks, so who answers for the project's problems? There's no monetary incentive so people fix it when they lazily get around to it, if ever.

I'd really like to know what "their bullshit" is. You haven't answered that.

I was actually going to post that the only real advantage of MS Office is that you have somebody you can yell at if something doesn't work, while you have no recourse with open-source stuff.

Not sure if that's truly helpful.

"Their bullshit" is stuff like working out just how to configure the toolbars - through trial and error, since they've changed it completely in Office 2008. While making it look like a standard OS X toolbar, they don't include the standard "Customize toolbar…" command, relying instead on a completely ****ed-up dialog/pop-up toolbar/drag-and-drop/checkbox amalgam that responds to "escape" by closing but doesn't have a "Cancel" button. Wait, strike that: "amalgam" implies that it's blended. Their "solution" is cobbled together like a chitty-bang on acid.

"Their bullshit" is stuff like keyboard shortcuts being settable in *at least* three different places within the application, with no real rhyme or reason as to which overrides the others when adding the key commands to the menus.

"Their bullshit" is having to spend time working out what the hell this new ribbon thing is, only to realize that it's completely useless in that it merely adds an animated method of inserting badonka-donk butt fugly tables and text elements and calendar templates into documents in ways that are fairly unpredictable and/or not usefully editable.

"Their bullshit" is having to wait for Office 2008 to launch, which takes considerably LONGER on a modern Intel Mac than Office 2004 did, despite the fact that it is now Intel-native and should thus be about ten times faster.

"Their bullshit" is working out that Microsoft's "it ain't a feature unless it's turned on" attitude is causing hefty slowdowns due to the fact that live grammar check is switched on by default.

That's just barely scratching the surface, but it's enough to make me quite angry over what constitutes IMO a blatant insult towards users.

OreoCookie · Mar 4, 2009, 03:05 PM

Originally Posted by starman

Name one.

Not Linux, but renowned Open Source projects:
(1) TeX: the best tested application on the planet. It's used to find bugs in compilers. It's also the most sophisticated type setting app on the planet.
(2) FreeBSD: Some of the most reliable servers run on FreeBSD.
(3) ZFS: the future of Mac filesystems™. Well, probably

(4) Many smaller `tools': ssh, bash, samba, rsync, bind, etc. etc. etc.

The quality of an app has nothing to do with whether it is Open Source or not, but rather whether there are sufficiently many able developers contributing to it in a coordinated manner.

OpenOffice is mediocre, because it wants to be the free office clone. Many things are solved very similarly to MS Office -- even though Office's implementation of the user interface is horrible.

Spheric Harlot · Mar 4, 2009, 03:08 PM

He specifically asked for "not clumsy", and I'm not entirely sure CLI really qualifies.

OreoCookie · Mar 4, 2009, 03:17 PM

My reply was aimed at starman's argument that Open Source software breaks a lot more often than software you pay for.

starman · Mar 4, 2009, 03:17 PM

Oreo, I was asking for apps, not projects.

OreoCookie · 03:34 PM

Originally Posted by starman

Oreo, I was asking for apps, not projects.

And TeX is not an app?
(Well, it's a collection of apps, but so is Office. But basically, just look at, say, pdftex or pdflatex.)

You can get service contracts for, say, Linux or OpenOffice quite easily, so you can get service like (or better than) that of software vendors. Just because you find a bug in, say, Word, Excel or Mathematica and you report it, doesn't mean the company is going to fix it. If the software company is too big or too small, then customers have trouble getting things fixed.

Hugi · Mar 4, 2009, 03:34 PM

Originally Posted by starman

Oreo, I was asking for apps, not projects.

During my daily routine, I use:

Eclipse: My open source IDE for java development.
WOLips: The open source Eclipse plugin for Eclipse for developing WebObjects-applications.
Adium: Open source, and by far the best IM client, at least for MSN communications (MSN messenger sucks big time)
FireFox: Open source web browser, by far the best for web development.
VLC: Open source media player. Please let me know if you know of a better closed-source one.

Oh, I know you don't like "projects", but every day I use MediaWiki, Apache, Ruby, python, perl, webkit, a gazillion open source open source java frameworks - and not to mention the dozens of unix utilites I rely on every day. You know - the open source ones that make up parts of the very foundation of the OS and it's functionality.

OreoCookie · Mar 4, 2009, 03:38 PM

How could I have forgotten about Adium and VLC, doh!

Hugi · Mar 4, 2009, 04:33 PM

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

How could I have forgotten about Adium and VLC, doh!

Well, perhaps because they work perfectly, and we tend to only remember the software that gets in our way? Just a theory.

starman · Mar 4, 2009, 05:06 PM

Adium blows. Why do people love this app to death? Yeah, it's convenient, but try using your cam with it on the Mac. WHOOPS! you can't.

The native app can.

VLC crashes too much. It always has. Yeah, it's ok but its functionality has a LOT to be desired.

Firefox is a good example of OSS done right, but only because it competes with MS. I doubt you'd get AS good of an app without the rabid anti-MS fanboys.

Sarc · Mar 4, 2009, 05:11 PM

Originally Posted by starman

Firefox is a good example of OSS done right, but only because it competes with MS. I doubt you'd get AS good of an app without the rabid anti-MS fanboys.

A point well argued

Also, let's not forget about Apache's companion, MySQL.

Hugi · Mar 4, 2009, 05:12 PM

Originally Posted by starman

Adium blows. Why do people love this app to death? Yeah, it's convenient, but try using your cam with it on the Mac. WHOOPS! you can't.

The native app can.

VLC crashes too much. It always has. Yeah, it's ok but its functionality has a LOT to be desired.

Firefox is a good example of OSS done right, but only because it competes with MS. I doubt you'd get AS good of an app without the rabid anti-MS fanboys.

I'm kind of confused... Are you being sarcastic?

Regarding Adium, What do you mean "the native app"?
You didn't point out a better media player for OS X than VLC? I don't have problems with crashing?
And your Firefox thing, well, not worth answering...

Salty · Mar 4, 2009, 05:56 PM

I prefer Nice Player + Perien. Oh and I love Adium, Growl, Cyberduck, and a few other open source apps I have.

Hg2491 · Mar 4, 2009, 07:36 PM

Originally Posted by starman

Name one.

LMMS

starman · Mar 4, 2009, 07:41 PM

Originally Posted by Hugi

I'm kind of confused... Are you being sarcastic?

Regarding Adium, What do you mean "the native app"?
You didn't point out a better media player for OS X than VLC? I don't have problems with crashing?
And your Firefox thing, well, not worth answering...

Meaning Yahoo or MSN which has MUCH more functionality in the NATIVE app than in Adium.

- - e r i k - - · Mar 4, 2009, 11:20 PM

The native MSN app has less functionality than Adium. Not sure what you are getting at here. There is only one alternative if you want MSN webcam chat and that's Mercury. Which is a far shittier OS project.

Adium has promised webcam chat for the next major version. But at the glacial speed that hobby OS projects moves at, we'll probably see that in 2025.

OreoCookie · 06:08 AM

Originally Posted by starman

Meaning Yahoo or MSN which has MUCH more functionality in the NATIVE app than in Adium.

The official MSN client doesn't have video conferencing. Last time I tried Yahoo's video chat, I got about 1 fps (on a 22 MBit internet connection). For voice and video chats, I just use Skype.
Not really sure what other features those clients have that Adium doesn't. I also very much prefer Adium's uiser interface (I have made a rather minimal theme).

You're accusing us of being `just MS haters,' but at the same time, you dismiss all OSS in much the same way you accuse others to deal with MS software. Fact of the matter is that there is good software and bad software, be it an operating system, a database or a development environment.

Whether a software is good or not does not really depend on whether it's open source or not. You can give examples of both, paid and free software that sucks or that is great. TextMate, OmniFocus, Nisus Writer Pro, Aperture and Pixelmator are pieces of paid software I personally find great and rely on to a great deal. Ditto for Adium, TeX, subversion, ssh and lots of smaller *nix things I need. Technically, I would also count TextMate's bundles -- which are open source and crucial to the success of this app. Although you may object and say that most of them do not have a GUI, I ask you `so what?'

When I had found bugs in Aperture and Pixelmator, I got very good feedback and responses. (Although Apple did not fix all the bugs I've logged, they fixed important ones and `expensive' ones.) Ditto for Adium. Microsoft doesn't have that kind of support.

besson3c · Mar 5, 2009, 03:36 AM

I've had this debate with starman before, and was unable to get him to actually say what he means to say. What Starman is railing against are open source GUI apps designed for the Desktop. Hugi has provided a great list of popular open source toolkits, apps, etc. that have been successes, as have I in the past, but for some reason these are either irrelevant or invalid to Starman, or else he insists that his confined narrow scope somehow makes his overall point valid.

To another poster in this thread, it simply isn't true that CLI = clumsy. There are some sorts of tasks that a CLI is *far* better suited and/or much faster than any GUI. I'm not sure why some have a hard time accepting that there is a world beyond point and click Desktop applications. It may be a much smaller world, but it is still an important one, and one that these same people perhaps take for granted.

To another poster "you get what you pay for" is not always true. There are several open source projects that are far superior to their commercial competition - either overall or in specific areas. Why is this? The model of being able to make a commodity out of every little piece of software just doesn't always work very well in some areas of computing. Do you have any idea how many little programs run on your Mac and fit together to make up OS X? These same little programs and others that are not included with OS X are what many sys admins, developers, and others depend on on a day-to-day basis. It would be a bloody mess if these were replaced by a spiderweb of proprietary tools.

Spheric Harlot · Mar 5, 2009, 05:19 AM

Originally Posted by starman

Firefox is a good example of OSS done right, but only because it competes with MS.

This is a weird point to make, because it's equally true of OpenOffice - which sucks.

I think the difference is less due to the fact that Firefox competes directly with MS, as to the fact that tens of thousands of people contribute to active development because they USE the app all the time.

The more widespread OpenOffice becomes, the more interest there will be among users (including those capable of contributing to the project) to make it not suck.

Of course, its BIGGEST problem is that its primary goal is to be as functionally compatible with Microsoft Office as possible, which means that the interface is for a LONG time going to continue orientating itself along the lines of a completely overloaded crudfest *by necessity*.

Spheric Harlot · Mar 5, 2009, 05:32 AM

Originally Posted by starman

Meaning Yahoo or MSN which has MUCH more functionality in the NATIVE app than in Adium.

I don't know about the Yahoo messenger, but the official MSN client is incredibly rudimentary and certainly doesn't support video at all.

Starman: I think you made a point that may be true in many respects, but there is such a plethora of counter-examples that you're really letting yourself get backed into a corner trying to defend it. Open-Source software just does not suck per se.

OpenOffice does suck, but frankly, with Office 2007/2008, the point has been reached where it seems to suck LESS, and at least you're not throwing $$$ at a company that seems to think your time is worth nothing (ironically the prime argument against OSS for years).

And again: The more people use it, the bigger the drive to improve it - with the advantage that any company with enough vested interest can actually hire their own people to improve the software to their own benefit.

turtle777 · Mar 5, 2009, 10:24 AM

Originally Posted by besson3c

To another poster in this thread, it simply isn't true that CLI = clumsy. There are some sorts of tasks that a CLI is *far* better suited and/or much faster than any GUI.

That's OT.

We are talking about office software (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations).

Any GUI based office software will be better than the best CLI office software. I'm serious, mostly

-t

besson3c · Mar 5, 2009, 10:49 AM

Originally Posted by turtle777

That's OT.

We are talking about office software (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations).

Any GUI based office software will be better than the best CLI office software. I'm serious, mostly

-t

It is, but so is Adium, and several of the other products mentioned here. Just going with the ebb and flow, and making love to this thread as I've learned from the master.

starman · Mar 5, 2009, 11:27 AM

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

I don't know about the Yahoo messenger, but the official MSN client is incredibly rudimentary and certainly doesn't support video at all.

I guess I imagined all those video calls I made with MSN.

EDIT: or do you mean on the Mac? Video is supported on Windows.

besson3c · Mar 5, 2009, 11:30 AM

I'm not sure how one can make any office program appealing. To me this is like making filling out your taxes appealing