Re: OT: Rant

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

<quote who="Kent West">
> I know it's not appropriate to rant, especially off-topic, but I
> just gotta!
>
> I really miss WordPerfect! And I wish there were some open-source
> software that did what it does.

i sorta miss wordperfect too. though wordperfect office 2000
was virtually unusable for me.last time i used it, it couldn't
export PDFs, consumed gobs of memory, couldn't print graphics,
was unstable, did not behave well with afterstep(dialog boxes
would often pop under the main window). i got a buncha
word perfect docs that i wrote at a former job.. i printed
some recently but had to install corel linux in vmware in
order to get corel office to work. i think i paid about $100
for it, but only got about 3-4 hours of real use out of
it, another 2 hours or so reconstructing documents after
a WP crash or exporting them to word6 format so i could
import them into office97 on aonther machine so i could
print graphics.

applixware has been no good for me either. i bought version 4,
it was ok, i never really used it. i tried a pirated copy
of version 5 for about 10 minutes, but it was severely broken,
semeemd to depend on a special font server which didn't like
my system so the app took 5 minutes to load, and had other
odd things so it didn't last 10 minutes on my system.

star office ..while a memory hog for the things i do(very
basic stuff) is rock solid. has never crashed always prints
right, and is very well behaved in afterstep. i'd gladly
pay $100 or so for it if they were charging its by
far the best office suite for linux/unix that i've used
sofar. my needs are very basic though, 98% of my work
is done in vi or gnotepad+ about the only thing i use
star office for is for things that need big fonts for
shipping labels, fax cover sheets etc. i could just
as easily run office2000 in vmware at near native
speeds but i just don't like MS products. printing
from gnotepad+ even with larger fonts does not appear
to work last time i tried, the font size does not
change on the printer(Laserjet4000 printing to
a remote lpd which in turn spools to a NT4 system)

i remember WP8 the stand alone app, never really used
it much though.

maybe Koffice will turn out good, doubt i will be
using it anytime soon as long as it depends on so many
dozens of libraries though. one of the things i really
like about star office is at least on every system ive
used it on(redhat, debian, solaris/sparc) i never had
to install extra packages to install it. even applixware5
had to install some package before it would install ..
openoffice seems to be a year or 2 away from anything
solid from what i've read.

nate