[CLUE-Tech] MS Office on Linux -- would you?

[Matt Gushee]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 08:12:30PM -0700, Michael Riversong wrote:
> If you know exactly how to get it for Linux, i would be interested.  I 
> have a copy of it for Corel Linux 1.2, but that whole distribution was 
> abandoned and sold off to Xandros.  Have tried to install that dist. 
> several times lately on various computers, but it has been very buggy so 
> no attempt has yet succeeded.  I haven't seen or heard about any other 
> easily obtainable version of Word Perfect since late 2001.

The other poster has suggested where to find WP, so I'm just here to
play humbug. Not to suggest that you shouldn't go ahead and try, but
after having used WordPerfect since the mid-80s, I was very disappointed
in the Linux version (as of about 4 years ago). There are two main
reasons I can remember:

 * The look and feel of the GUI seemed like--if you'll pardon the
   simile--a 98-pound weakling on cocaine. Buttons were too small,
   mouse interaction was hypersensitive, and so on. It was just really
   unpleasant to work with compared to other GUIs of the same vintage
   (e.g. ApplixWare or StarOffice).

 * The macro language was crippled in some really absurd way--I don't
   recall exactly, but it may have been that you couldn't write
   functions that would return values; at any rate, it was something
   basic and important like that. This was of concern to me because
   I had written a substantial macro package for HTML editing, and it
   relied heavily on the capability that was missing under Linux. 

I no longer care very much about office suites, so it's all water under
the bridge to me, but I thought you might want to be prepared for the
shock.

-- 
Matt Gushee                 When a nation follows the Way,
Englewood, Colorado, USA    Horses bear manure through
mgushee at havenrock.com           its fields;
http://www.havenrock.com/   When a nation ignores the Way,
                            Horses bear soldiers through
                                its streets.
                                
                            --Lao Tzu (Peter Merel, trans.)