[KLUG Members] recommended office suite

[members@kalamazoolinux.org]

>I'm guessing that Open Office is the suite of choice these days,
>StarOffice's star seems to be fading and 

No.  Open Office = Star Office.  The developement of the packages track each
other.  Star Office is Open Office with some commercial (copyrighted) add-ons.

Star Office 5.2 is fading fast.  And with that UI it can't go away fast enough.

>I haven't heard much about WordPerfect Office for Linux.  

Last time I used word perfect I'm quite certain I heard faintly, as from a great
distance, the playing of bugles.  Then I slapped the side of the computer
monitor real hard because the friggin' app couldn't even keep up with my typing.
 It is dead,  and while it was the first real word processor released for Linux
(and I spent $289 for a copy), it won't be missed.  Their Linux port stank.

>What would you recommend for a new student computer?

OO is good, and LARGE.  Equivalent to M$-Office.

I use Star Office because 1.) It is included with my Ximian subscription @ $10 a
month, so it is "free".  2.) Includes templates,  not a show stopper, but
installing OO I'd have to take 10 minutes and import the templates from SO5.2. 
OO doesn't come with any templates (yet). 3.)The commercial spell checker in SO
is *currently* superior to the one in OO,  and supports multiple languages, 
which if your student is mono-ligual they won't care about.  4.) The logo is
cooler :)

But don't dismiss the applications (Abiword, Gnumeric, etc...) that come with
Ximian.  Gnumeric is a REAL industrial-strength spreadsheet.  And Abiword is
perfectly serviceable for 90% of documents (last time I check; no footnotes. 
which makes it useless for me).