Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3644 mails)

[Doug McGarrett <dougmack@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 08:57 02/28/2002 +0000, Fergus Wilde wrote:
> > I concur--SuSE (or any other distro) is not ready for application to the
> > masses as a suitable home/office desktop candidate as long as there are
> > other OS's which are much more friendly. 
>
> Well I would have said this might have been true up to the release of 7.3. I 
> know there's a lot of luck in this in terms of hardware (tho' it clearly 
> helps if you use mainstream stuff), but I recently had to reinstall both 
> Windows and SuSE 7.3 when a motherboard broke.  The SuSE installation was
the 
> faster and the easier of the two, and set up all hardware right first time, 
> unlike Windows.  This went down as far as the mouse-wheel, parallel port zip 
> drive and pass-through to the printer.  I was ready to run, including a 
> decent (if not wonderful) office suite in the shape of Star Office.  And
this 
> cost a *tiny fraction* of setting up anything like a similar working 
> environment under Windows, in which I would have paid for the office
suite, a 
> graphics programme, anti-virus, you name it.
>
> 7.3 required no 'guru' tricks, which is a good thing, because I'm not one.
 I 
> only boot Windows now in order to play the odd game.
>
> Just my 2 euro-cents,
> Best
> Fergus
/snip/

I saw the next version of Star Office at the Linux show in New York last
month.
If it really does what they showed, it will be stupendous.  I only wish they
had imitated more of WordPerfect, but maybe some of that's in there.  It's
supposed to be available in April, some time.  Free.  (I think.)  I always
liked the WordPerfect 5.1 Windows version.  I think they made it worse with
all
the extra stuff they added later, but I STILL like the current version better 
than WORD.  (I refer to the Windows version.  I could never read the screen
fonts
in Linux.)  If I didn't have to read modern word processer docs all the
time, I 
would cheerfully run WP5.1 as mine.

--doug