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It really is a pity that we do not have anything stable or acceptably fast enough to compete with ms office. My students would rather use office 97 on our old samba p233 boxes any day compared to our p733 linux boxes also under Samba running star, oo or hancom. The latter being only marginally slower however. A vast improvement. Why are Linux based office applications so slow? Is there a single answer? Not everyone can afford a P IV with 256MB upon which admittedly all of the above really fly out of the screen!
Cheers, Steve.
While all the linux office suites except koffice and the gnome equivalents are generally too slow, people should remember though that Office 97 is 5 years old, and Office XP is immensely slow on anything below a P4 with 256MB of RAM (my Duron 800 with 650MB suffers on it). Hopefully once openoffice reaches feature completion, there can be some serious work put into speed optimisation by Sun to make it operate at somewhere near the speed of the more lightweight systems. Ewan