Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Applications: Office Suite
Windows Default: None
What I use: Office 2007
Ubuntu Default: OpenOffice
Another thing that sets Ubuntu apart from Windows and Mac OS X is that the default install (and again, it fits on a CD) includes an office suite in the form of OpenOffice 2.4. Unfortunately OpenOffice 2.x is rather awful, which makes for a bad first impression. Admittedly this is the age of Ubuntu 8.04 showing since OpenOffice 3 wasn’t ready for nearly a year, but nevertheless I really, really wish that Ubuntu would inform new users about OpenOffice 3, stable application platform policies be damned.
This is going to be one of the few cases where I’m going to skip right past the Ubuntu default and move to something else. If you install Hardy, don’t waste your time on OpenOffice 2.4, go straight for OpenOffice 3.1.
With that out of the way, OpenOffice 3.1 is the latest version in the long line of the OpenOffice series. As has been the case for a number of years now, OpenOffice is the largest competitor for Microsoft Office, with Apple’s iWork and as of late, Google Docs as the other mainstream competitors in the office suite business. Like Firefox it’s an important cross-platform open source application, and is available on just about everything that has an operating system. Furthermore since Microsoft Office is not available for Linux like it is Windows or Mac OS X, it is the de-facto office suite for Linux.
In spite of its de-facto status, OpenOffice doesn’t have a particularly glorious history. Prior versions have a reputation for being slow and development has been equally glacial at times (e.g. it wasn’t until 3.0 that there was a native Mac OS X version). Furthermore as Microsoft Office’s loyal opposition, the OpenOffice developers have had to play catch-up to Microsoft whenever they do something new – such as introducing the Office Open XML format – which has limited the compatibility of OpenOffice and hence its suitability of a replacement.
With OpenOffice 3.x a lot of that has changed. Right off the bat one of the biggest changes has been much better support for Microsoft’s formats, with better reading and writing ability of the “old” 2003 binary formats, and the ability to read (but not write) the new OOXML format. In our informal testing we had no problem opening up a number of our old DOC/XLS and newer DOCX/XLSX files, with all of them presenting themselves correctly. We do have some 3rd party Excel files though (Intel’s Monte Carlo simulation) that would not open correctly under OpenOffice.
Like Microsoft Office, the core applications of OpenOffice include a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), and a presentation program (Impress). Backing that up are database program (Base), an equation editor (Math), and unique to OpenOffice a vector graphics editor (Draw). OpenOffice does not include an email client, in the case of Ubuntu that task is covered by Evolution.
From a features standpoint OpenOffice fits somewhere between Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007, this being a testament to the developers of OpenOffice given that it’s free and Microsoft Office is bloated. For what OpenOffice can’t do, I suspect you would need to be a hardcore Microsoft Office user to truly appreciate the difference. At this point OpenOffice is well beyond the feature set most home users would need, or even many corporate users.
From a visual standpoint OpenOffice isn’t quite as advanced however. Visually it’s still largely a clone of Microsoft Office 2000 or so. By no means do visuals make an office suite when it comes to word processing or spreadsheets, but this means that certain conventions that have gone out of style for Windows programs are still in use for OpenOffice. Users Microsoft Office 2007’s Ribbon UI will be particularly hard-pressed to move back down.
The lack of visual splendor does put OpenOffice at a notable disadvantage when it comes to Impress though. Where presentations often have a great deal of focus on such matters, OpenOffice doesn’t have the library of art and templates to match PowerPoint. It’s not by any means bad, but if I had a Pointy Haired Boss that loved eye candy, Impress would probably not impress them.
Otherwise Writer and Calc are competent versions of their Microsoft Office counterparts. There are no specific surprises here as both do what they’re supposed to, but nothing more. This article was written almost entirely using Write with no outstanding issues to report. It may not sound impressive, but Microsoft Office is a hard act to follow. Doing so for free when Microsoft Office is $150 or more is even more impressive. It’s something where you’ll never forget that you’re using a clone of Microsoft Office, but for the price tag you can excuse the lack of flair.
On a note about flair, like Firefox the experience is improved if some of Microsoft’s font sets are installed, particularly if you have documents written using them or are accustomed to writing in them. These font sets do not include Cambria, so Word 2007 documents are still going to look off.
Overall, I must admit that I generally did not use OpenOffice for my day-to-day use – the bulk of my use of it was for writing nearly this whole article. Outside of the lack of the ability to write OOXML files I didn’t run in to any specific problems, but I am accustomed to Microsoft Office’s Ribbon UI. Since I already have a copy of Microsoft Office there was nothing stopping me from using it beyond what Wine would do. As Wine is able to run Microsoft Office 2007 well enough that it met my needs, I didn’t have any strong reason to stick with OpenOffice besides experimentation and research for this article. If I didn’t have a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 (such as only having 2003, for example) would have stuck with OpenOffice, but as I did I was not prepared to take the efficiency hit in moving away from the Ribbon UI. This says more about the user than the program, but it’s also a subtle hint that OpenOffice could benefit from moving in the same direction.
Final Verdict: Meets My Needs, But I Didn’t Use It
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amrs - Saturday, September 26, 2009 - link
Your ignorance and stupidity is showing here. No engineering software for Linux? Hello? Matlab is available, Simulink is available, Labview the same. Xilinx and Altera have supported Linux for a long time and so do the smaller FPGA houses like Lattice and Actel. Mentor Graphics too. Orcad is the only one you mentioned that isn't available on Linux, but Cadence does support Linux with their Allegro product and so does Mentor Graphics with PADS and Board Station and Expedition.MadIgor - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
I have to disagree. You are NOT talking abut average Joe/Jane. I think that even the article author is kind of biased towards enthusiast user. Ubuntu actualy completes all needs of average Joe/Jane user, you can browse www, you can do email/scheduling, you can play games (easy non enthusiast games), you can DL pictures from your camera and edit them, you can even playback mp3/CD and video, do basic office work, all out of the box. The gnom learning curve for PC beginners is much shorter then with windows. Most of the average Joes/Janes dont install aps or peripherals by themselfs, belive me I had to install it for them many many times on Win systems (the best is "installing" digital camera: plug one wire end in camera, other in PC). Yes I agree that installing Ubuntu so that ALL is runing right may be pain in the ass, but average Joe/Jane naever install their system (not Win, nor MacOS), but when they get the PC with preinstalled Ubuntu you are done. With windows you have to worry that they will "bother" you every few months with non working system. Yes it might be nice source of income for PC technician, but not always welcome as reliability advertising (for customer to come).I did some instalation of Ubuntu to my customers mostly as a "safe" web/mail PC, they all where used to windows platform already, after one week of using Ubuntu even the hardest critisizer where comfy to use Ubuntu (some even asked me to install it on their home PCs), The most "problem" was: that no one can read our "excel" files. So I showed them that it has to be saved with .xls extension and voila, no more problems. I was NEVER asked for any CAD system, nor MATHLAB, not even Graphics apps, all what they used in offie was already there! Then there are home users, only complaint was that thay had windows at work, but after few houres all was fine, only kids had problems that they cannot play enthusiast games on it. My wife is running Ubuntu for three years now, with no problem. When my 62 year old mother asked me for a computer I brought her a notebook with Ubuntu, had no time to explain it comming next mornig. My mom never used a computer before (ok shooting ships on my ATARI doesnt count), next mornig I came there, she was already browsing. I asked her how did she do that and she said its easy, tap the aplications then internet and one of the apps was "internet". She even installed the snake game, Isaid how did you do that, she said in aplications section is install new aplication, then she clicked on games and then she piscked what she tought would be the game for her and then install, whas that wrong? she asked, I said NO, its right.
BTW no one knows that they can use CLI or that there is some terminal window in Ubuntu. They are average Joes/Janes.
Not everyone is an enthusisat with PC full of stuff that, and be honest, you dont use on dayli base.
The truth is that Ubuntu will not be a succesfull system for enthusiast or high level profesionals until big software houses (Adobe, hallo!) and game producers will not start to port software for Linux. But that is not fault of Ubuntu or linux and again we are not talking here about majority of users (I mean Joes/Janes).
fazer150 - Friday, September 4, 2009 - link
All folks who think Linux is hard. Have you tried PCLinuxOS? this is easier to install, use than Windows XP, 2003 and Vista period.there is no Windows hatred here, but you have to try that before you complain.
I have access to all Windows OS at work including the latest Win 7 RC but i find PCLinuxOS easy to setup and use. Needs no special admin skills every config is GUI driven.
Linux has come a long way from where it was 5 years ago!
Cynicist - Sunday, September 6, 2009 - link
There are two things I'd like to comment on that bothered me about this article. Firstly, most regular users do not use LTS, the software is just too old and the latest releases of Ubuntu are quite stable. LTS is mostly guaranteed stability for corporate environments.Second, this package manager hatred is based on this flawed idea that no packages exist outside of the official repositories. A simple google search for deb packages leads to GetDeb.net, a website dedicated to providing up to date packages of all kinds of software specifically for Ubuntu. Google search too hard you say? But its even less difficult to find packages because many project sites (such as wine, featured in this article) include multiple packages for various distributions and even PACKAGE TYPES.
Overall not a bad article. The author definitely knows technology and I'm grateful for that, but he did not seem to do much research on the actual community itself or the Linux Way of doing things. These are minor issues which will resolve themselves with time and I'm looking forward to seeing more linux articles on this site in the future.
cliffa3 - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
I was concerned as well with the constant releases...until I upgraded the first time. I had set aside the better part of an evening because I was *sure* there were going to be plenty of headaches. I've done three such version upgrades now and am happy (not to mention shocked) to report that it's literally a one click upgrade. Simply amazing. I'm sure something will get mucked up in the future with one of the version upgrades for me...but for now all has gone amazingly smooth.That being the case, I have to disagree with you on the "they release too often" point. I understand it's a pain to sift through all the search results on the forums, but I also have found some older threads (sometime 3 versions back) that the same fixes work for my issue. I agree they need to tag posts with version info...that would make it far easier. Also, there's far more useful information in the (versionally-diluted) forums than I've found for any other piece of software or OS I've used. I almost don't cringe when I have a problem or issue now because I'm quite confident I can find the information without too much digging.
I'd encourage you to upgrade versions from your current install (don't wipe) and comment on how the process goes. Maybe I've just had an extremely easy (and lucky) go of things with no problems...it'll be interesting to read your experiences. Honestly with how easy my upgrades have been, I look forward to new releases (but still give them a few weeks before upgrading...just to see the comments from other users).
Mem - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
Very good read as usual,personally I like to see Kubuntu reviewed at some point(I hear Kubuntu 9.10 is due in Oct) ,as you know its the KDE version,also Gnome and KDE compared would be interesting.I think the main problem for new Linux users is which one to go with,sure they are all free but it can be confusing and time consuming to try them all,some are more noob friendly then others like Ubuntu/Mint.
lishi - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
Since you spend so many time dealing with the windows its worth pointing that compiz is actually much more powerful then what you wrote.Install the package ccsm-simple for more option.(like different application selector, different windows animations etc).
Or install ccsm for the complete configuration tools. Given most of them are eye-candy there some who can improve the desktop experience.
sethk - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
In this sentence:"It’s undoubtedly a smart choice, because if Ubuntu wiped out Windows like Windows does Ubuntu, it would be neigh impossible to get anyone to try it out since “try out” and “make it so you can’t boot Windows” are mutually incompatible"
The more common phrase is 'nigh on impossible' (as in close to impossible) or you could say it's nigh-impossible. Definitely not neigh. Sorry to point out grammar issues, but this is a pet peeve, right along with pique being spelt peak or peek (as in pique my interest).
v8envy - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
I've been a 100% Linux desktop (Ubuntu 9.04) user at home ever since I bought my last i7 920. Gaming, multimedia, web -- everything a typical desktop user does under Windows. The inconvenience of migrating an existing Windows install & re-activation outweighed the convenience using Linux which simply booted and worked on the new hardware.Yes, there are times where you must fire up Google and search for solutions, some of which are commands to be pasted into a terminal window. Yes, sometimes you need to upgrade software packages (Wine is horribly out of date for instance).
On the other hand, with Windows you get apprximately 1,337 updaters which run on startup, virus checkers, malware checkers, browser parasite checkers, firewalls, DRM and misc layers of barnacles which accumulate the longer you use the system. Thankfully the gathering of cruft is not a bane on the typical Linux system yet.
Try 9.04 and see if it is more to your liking. LTS means nothing when most open source problems are "supported" by simply upgrading to the latest software.
trexpesto - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
"linux" is "niche" spelled inside out and backwards..in rot13.