On Mon, Feb 14, 2000 at 12:11:59AM +1100, Andrew Macks wrote:
> I use StarOffice. It's a little slow, but it works. Compatibility is
> fairly good, however, StarOffice -WILL NOT- open password protected MS
> Office documents.
It's certainly BIG, but I don't think I'd single it out for being
slow. I've been using StarOffice 5.1a for a couple of weeks now,
mostly because I've found that it really can read and write the
Office'97 documents that they use at work. I'd say that it felt
significantly faster than the equivelant Windows components that
I've used, but I've seen the VM footprint go up to 120M, and the
working set sit at 96M, so I can well imagine that it would get
slow through paging if you didn't have that much RAM.
> I have not tried Applixware or Wordperfect, which I consider as the only
> other two major usable competitors in the Office market (at this time).
I haven't used Applixware, but know people who love it, and use it
all the time. I admit to having been tempted, but it's payware,
and SO is doing a reasonable job at the moment. I've used Wordperfect
(the download version) too. Not having used WP before, some of
its dialogs and methods seemed a little peculiar: it's not very
Word'97-like. It also doesn't do as good a job as SO5.1 for reading
Word files, and can't write them.
> Linux games support is lacking tremendously.
The computer _is_ the game ;-)
> Most of this can be blamed
> (too harsh a word perhaps) on XFree86.
Oh, crap. You can blame it on historical factors and the size of
the target market, more likely.
> It was "designed" for 1 and 2Mb
> video cards, NOT for 32Mb 3D OpenGL compatible cards.
That's crap too. X was running on hardware accellerated 3D, 24
bpp, Z buffered graphics systems while PCs were still using EGA
and VGA cards. Ever heard of Sun or Silicon Graphics?
> As a result, there
> has been many small projects like GLX and DGA to try and bring more
> graphics handling to XFree86, however, there were still issues which could
> not be fixed by at least a partial rewrite, thus XFree 4.0. Unfortunately
> I have to say, although XFree 4.0 (3.9.17) is faster in 2D, I still can't
> get 3D stuff to work reliably and when I do, at a decent speed. I think
> the X server still has a little way to come before it will be accepted on
> the whole.
Or you could go and buy one of the commercial X servers that have
had OpenGL support for very nearly as long as there have been cards
that supported it. So the free version is a bit behind the curve?
That's the way it (OSS) works.
> Also *WHERE ARE ANTIALIASED FONTS*. Appearance means
> everything, and anti-aliased fonts make a ***BIG*** difference to the
> user.
Yeah. That's a bit tricky, because the X11R[1-6] protocols are
fundamentally pixel- and bitmap- oriented, and antialiased fonts
require the manipulation of sub-pixel measurements. Obviously it's
something that can be done, and probably will be done, but it
requires an extension to the underlying protocol, as well as the
corresponding support in the servers. I believe that GTK has an
"anti-aliased canvas", which will probably provide this effect,
but I fear that it involves doing the font rendering in the client
libraries, and shipping pixmaps to the server, which is a pretty
nasty circumvention of the whole X approach.
(Incidentally, the first system I ever used that had anti-aliased
fonts was Acorn Risc/OS, on an early Archimedes machine. Anti-aliasing
made 10-pt Roman readable on a screen that only had 16 colours
(4bpp) at 600x200 or so. (Yes, they could cope with non-square
pixels too.) A remarkably slick system. It's always surprised me
how slow the rest of the industry has been to catch up. I suspect
that one of the reasons that X never bothered with anti-aliased
fonts is that it was developed on workstations with megapixel
displays. They probably assumed that resolutions would only continue
to go up, so there was no need to complicate the font rendering
process for the bennefit of low resolution monitors.)
--
Andrew
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