Ian Lynch wrote:
They're used
to peripherals that don't work as well or at all.
My peripherals are working fine, thank you very much ;-)
It's not too bad on my desktop machine, but my older Toshiba laptop is
another story. I've tried both Mepis and Fedora on it, and neither
distro could find the sound card at all, the video is strictly generic,
and for some reason, Fedora thinks the floppy drive is a 32 gig hard
drive that's out of commission. Thank goodness I don't need to use the
modems on either machine.
What matters is whether your system as a whole does what you want. When
I get a Mandriva distro, I get all the apps I need, I'm not bothered
whether that are in one monolithic program or several that sit side by
side.
The interesting thing here is that OOo is the only full-featured office
suite that I'm aware of that fits the definition of "one monolithic
program". MSO is actually a collection of several individual apps and
the same is true of Wordperfect Office and the old Lotus Smartsuite I
used to use.
I think one of the things to ask yourself is, "Why OOo at all?" I mean,
if you dislike the idea of monolithic, integrated programs, then why not
use Abiword, Gnumeric, et. al.? I think the answer is that some people
prefer one paradigm and others prefer the opposite, and OOo fills the
niche for those that prefer an integrated suite. Given that reality,
adding a pim or dtp fits perfectly with the design philosophy of the
program and the only question is an issue of resources.
I know about Kontact, I just choose not to use it because our company
uses web calendar. Its accessible anywhere in the world on any machine
with a browser. Calendars are not anything to do with E-mail, they are
calendars just as WPs are WPs and spreadsheets are spreadsheets.
I think that you can't categorize these things as neatly as you would
like. I've seen documents with extensive word processing and no
calculations at all composed on a spreadsheet, and rightly so because
the whole thing had a very tabular format. OTOH, if all you need are
simple arithmetic and summations, you can do that in a Writer table.
There isn't a lot of difference between an email saying, "Meeting at 10
am.", and a calendar invite.
Windows does suck for some things. Viruses and cost to the user are two.
Windows does have the advantage of running more applications than Linux,
I haven't heard anyone dispute that. It is hardly surprising in an open
source group that there is a political bias towards Linux, an Open
Source OS and antipathy towards a closed source OS, Windows. Why does
that surprise you?
It doesn't surpise me, it just annoys me when arguments shift 180
degrees depending on the point that's trying to be made.
You can't have it both ways. It
can't simultaneously be "superior" and "good enough".
It can. It can be good enough in many aspects and fundamentally superior
in others, I mentioned a couple earlier. Its good enough for many people
in terms of the applications it will run and fundamentally better in
that it is free and has no virus problem. If running Outlook is not a
priority to you why worry about it?
Because we get a lot of requests for it on this list, and the replies
are sort of lame, mostly because the alternatives are sort of lame at
this point.
--
Rod
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