Hello,
>>> The majority of people will find OO good enough to use
>>
>> That's just an assertion.
> No,it isn't.
Yes it is. An assertion is: "Something declared or stated positively,
often with no support or attempt at proof." Show me the support or
attempt at proof in your original statement and I will retract my
claim that it is 'just' an assertion.
> Where there are
> problems is when docs created in MS office are used in OO.
This may be a problem. My experience is that in 99% of the cases
documents created in MS office work fine in OOo. The exceptions tend
to be where quirky formatting or macros are used.
> This doesn't mean OO is crap.
No, it doesn't.
> Documents created in OO don't crash.
Yes they do. Categorically. I have concrete experience of exactly
this problem with small to medium sized spreadsheets that were created
in oocalc crashing, causing the system to hang, and taking 20 minutes
to recover from a crash or open in the first place. This is using a
wide range of releases and versions including Debian Stable, CentOS,
and the current release running under OSX.
> I'm sure Mac software has similar problems with MS office docs.
Probably. But that wasn't my concern.
> The other issue is user familiarity of MS office. Just because OO
> doesn't exactly mirror MS office doesn't mean it is crap.
Straw man. When did I claim that? As a person who makes a living out
of recommending and migrating people to services built around open
source software, you may assume I understand that software isn't crap
because it is not an exact clone of some other iece of software
someone else uses.
Let me restate: Openoffice is bloated and unstable. I discussed this
with some of the project leads at Fosdem, and all they could do was
look sheepish and nod and say "we're trying to improve things".
S.
--
Stephen Nelson-Smith
Technical Director
Atalanta Systems Ltd
www.atalanta-systems.com
