Let's face the cold hard truth here - OpenOffice.org, the featured Office suite on many GNOME based Linux distributions, sucks. Sort of.

Let's start with the name. For Pete's sakes, don't name your damned product by the name of the website you freaking host it on!

Next, It's based on Java. Now I don't have anything against Java or anything, but seriously? When there are great GTK+ APIs to take advantage of, you use the Java thing that doesn't even roll very well with the universalized theme that you spent so much time working on?

Feel free to elaborate, I know there's WAY more to completely go Richard Stallman about here...

Agreeeement

I freaking hate OO.org. Not in the "Oh God I wish this project would just die" way, but I seriously only use it if I'm going to do some really quick note taking or something. Otherwise I reboot and use MS Office 2007.

The interface is just... Horrible. I'd say that OO.org (writer) is about on par with MS Office 2003, but that was released over half a decade ago. I always recommend OO.org to people who are looking to get an office suite, but that's just because you couldn't possibly beat the price. No one who has used both OO.org and MS Office >=2007 could honestly say that they are equal in terms of user-friendliness, stability and overall quality.

There are two big things that drive me insane about OO.o:

*The user interface jumps around depending on what type of object you cursor is on in the document. Toolbars appear and disappear, making the document jump around like crazy.

*MS Word compatibility is not suitable for working with other people. Unfortunately, much of the world uses MS Office, so you have to work with the .doc format. People send me documents that I'm expected to print out and use for stuff, but OO.o doesn't layout the document properly, so it doesn't look like it's supposed to. I'm currently job hunting; when I need to make a minor change to my resume, I can't use OO.o to do it - it'll mangle the document and make it look horrible on Word.

And don't even get me started about changing the orientation of a freaking piece of clip-art. It's impossible. If you try, you might find a way that looks like it worked - until you print it out.

I really wish distros would stop bundling it (Looking at you ubuntu!). For those that have to have an office suite they tend to dual boot windows for office and those that dont its a lot of wasted space.

The first thing i do with any distro is trim out the OO junk.

I hate to say it but for my needs i actually prefer the new and improved wordpad in windows 7 to OO.

Just un-install it. I will admit when I do a machine I start without even x and then add the things i like. You can set up a batch files to auto install the files you want. As for OOO ( originally developed by sun and known as Staroffice) everyone wanted to be so much like MS, that is why you have it. There are several other office packages to consider if you take the time to search the repos or places like sourceforge. People complain, but they do not take the time to know linux and or software in general. IT copout mania.

I've looked. Abiword is very nice and lightweight, but is much worse with the .doc compatibility. And then there's KWord. It's the worst with .doc compatibility. It can't insert an svg or any other vector format artwork, which makes it close to useless for printing professional documents. Although it needs some bugs fixed and some polish added, its user interface is pretty sweet. I think this one has the most potential because those KDE folk are on fire.

I do hate the OpenOffice.org in the application names.. The first thing I do is rename it all... But as far as usability I have not had any issues. It is kind of old and unintuitive but it is free...

I use it for work to write reviews with ms office templates and have been lucky with compatibility. Never was a deal breaker for me.

My brother teaches msoffice at a local college, but uses openoffice at home and loves it. I am old fashion and still use ascii files quite a bit. fancy fonts do not impress me. I will use openoffice either on linux or a microsoft based os when it is required or I need to look at a file generated by msoffice or openoffice. I have office xp, but I do not think I ever installed it at home. I also find myself using the eyeos apps a a lot also when I need gui. eyeos is getting to be kind of nifty. The best part I can use it via a web interface almost anywhere and there is no need to carry usb sticks around.

To fix the name you could bundle the IBM-branded Lotus Symphony variant of OO.org.

Actually there is a very good reason why they name it that way. Sun open sourced Star Office and called it Openoffice. For a while, it was all good and peachy and long after the name got established, someone claimed trademark rights on Openoffice in a particular region. Sun could have completely renamed the project and lost the brand value completely but it settled the problem but calling the project Openoffice.org instead. It was a practical decisions under the constraints they operated under.