Compared and Contrasted: OpenOffice V. LibreOffice 294
GMGruman writes "Oracle's imposition of fees for some OpenOffice capabilities caused some of the venerable open source office suite's creators to head out on their own and create LibreOffice as a truly free OSS tool. InfoWorld's Neil McAllister reviews the two OSS productivity tools side by side to figure out where they differ, and whether you can jettison Oracle's OpenOffice safely for the fully free LibreOffice."
Ho Hum article. (Score:4, Interesting)
No doubt we shall shortly see posts from the Microsoft shills bagging OOo and variants, but the simple truth is that for 99.9% of purposes, the FOSS offerings are perfectly adequate.
Re:Outlook (Score:5, Interesting)
*facepalm*
Zimbra, as has been mentioned before, is among the closest I've seen, but the list you wrote are NOT outlook substitutes.
I know a LOT of Outlook users, and NONE of them have ever listed Usenet as a necessary feature. If you're going to list Thunderbird as a viable alternative, you'll then by definition have to also list Windows Live Mail, since techncially it does do e-mail. ignoring user familiarity and data lock-in, here's what you're missing:
-Exchange support - yes, Exchange does POP3 and imap, but device sync, user policy and dozens of other backend features make it a staple in many server rooms. Again, there are FOSS alternatives, but "just because" isn't a good enough reason to ditch a perfectly working exchange server for a product many sysadmins don't know how to use (and "well they should" is a load of crap if their organization isn't using a non-exchange product already, and most of us have better things to do in our day like work on the actual Exchange server). There's also Blackberry server, OWA, and a swath of other things in the exchange ecosystem that the alternatives simply can't compete with yet.
-Calendar features - Sunbird is great, and has decent Thunderbird collaboration, but it's nowhere near as fluid. Meeting requests, room scheduling, and 'presence' features are just a few things off the top of my head that my office would crucify me for if I switched them to something else.
-Instant search of large mailboxes - can any of the applications you list do near-instant, as-you-type searches of inboxes that are 20GBytes or larger? heck, how do they handle mail of that volume? It's not as ridiculous as you might think, I've got several users with PST files that large.
Outlook has its issues (the fact that PST repair utilities exist is telling of one of them), but at the end of the day, I've yet to see an e-mail program of the FOSS variety that can compare to Outlook. Zimbra is pretty close, but it still comes up short - ask anyone in my office.
Re:All about features, not stability (Score:5, Interesting)
conveniently ignored the part about command-o being two relatively small keypresses versus one really big one?
you could flip that and say that the single (granted small, out of the way key) keypress F2 for renaming in windows is probably quite a good solution.
i find renaming to be an annoying task in OSX. the double-click speed mixed with my own impatience means it's pot luck as to whether i rename the next file or open it.
removal of all eject and restart buttons is a big problem. as is the steadfast, bloody-minded and consistent refusal to get out of the '80s and put at least a second button on their mouse. instead they have 1 big button that covers the entire surface of the thing, and after a week of use the thing's so fucked it can't tell if you pressed the left or right side unless you place your fingers in ergonomically painful positions.
the nipple-mouse does not cut it - the trackball thing is so flimsy that on the mac i use most frequently i can't even scroll up (but i can scroll down and side-by-side). don't even fucking get me started on the clicking and dragging by clutching the sides with my thumb-and-weakest-finger causing shooting pain up the sides of my arm. macs are used for design! who would have guessed people would click-and-drag quite often?
a lack of "process priority" in their equivalent of windows' task manager is a big pain - having to use terminal and sudo renice to perform a task i do several times an hour on a PC.
how about having no menu button on the goddamned "pro cinema HD" displays. try doing colour critical work where 2 identical monitors have the same brightness setting (the only setting you have control on the actual screen), running the exact same colour profile, can look completely different, with no remedy in software to correct for it without massive and egregious loss of precision. nothing worse than having a client look between 2 different monitors, and 1 different broadcast monitor and ask you which one they're meant to be looking at.
okay, i'm ranting now. but Mac sucks at UI no matter how much the fanboys squeal that they're actually not stupid, they're advaaanced.