On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 01:47:22AM -0500, Linux Rocks! wrote: > : > : Several reasons (why I bought my Powerbook): > : > : > : > : 1. Ability to actually open Word documents people keep giving me > : > : without them getting annoyed when I tell them that OOo ate the thing. > : > > : > OOo sigh... OpenOffice was a disapointment to me. however abiword or even > : > kword work fine. > : > : Abiword may one day be the Linux word processor of choice. It's not > : today, though. =( > > I have no complaints about abiword... works great for me. much better than > OOo/StarOffice, but then I really dont use that type of software often...
One factor is that I am a student. This means I get Word documents handed to me daily and I can't make excuses if my software isn't compatible with them. This means I actually have (igh) Word for Mac. It's an acceptable program actually and good enough that I tend to use it instead of Appleworks for that purpose. For the rest of Office, I usually use Appleworks or Keynote instead because ... well let's face it, Office is not exactly something Microsoft has a vested interest in seeing become too good or too useful on the Mac. I see Abiword as more akin to WordPad in Win32 than to Word, but then Linux needs a decent WordPad. Appleworks just feels too much like an old MacOS 9 program (because it basically is, just built with Carbon.) Little things like keyboard controls are missing, which suck for writing papers and the like. All the same, Abiword will probably find a place in my dock if it works out as well on the Mac as it was under Linux. I'd really like to see it running under a native GTK though, and I'm not sure it will be terribly useful without three buttons on my notebook, but still. > well... I was thinking about DVD players mostly... every laptop Ive looked at > recently has DVD (not RW), and CDRW, most are built in, but some are > removable. The Dell (even the $600 one) did have many optical drive options > (no extra charge) of DVDR, CD/DVD, CDRW, or CD. I think the DVDR was 4x, CD/ > DVD was 24x RW, 8x DVD read I think. anyway you get the picture... I have a hard time accepting that there is no extra charge given that the choice then would be DVD+-RW, just as it would be for a desktop. (The drives are getting cheaper on the desktop - cheaper enough that that IS the standard choice for a new machine anymore.) Dell and Gateway typically offer DVD or CDRW for a fixed price, a combo drive for more. Burning DVDs is not something I've seen even as an option on non-mac notebooks thus far, though given that the Mac has had them for a year, it's about time the PC makers "innovate" the "first" notebooks to offer them. ;) > If you buy a laptop with removable optical drive bay, you can replace it with > whatever comes out next year... or even use it as a extra battery slot, or > floppy, ... many of the sub $1000 laptops are all in one units, with no > removable drives, but not all. > How comfortable the keyboard/pointer is probably a better reason to buy one > laptop over another IMHO. That was one of the reasons why I bought the (more expensive) Powerbook. The iBook just didn't have as nice a keyboard. Avoid Gateway notebooks, their keyboards are crap. Dell too bad - pretty similar to the iBook. IBM is supposed to have better, though I haven't tried their latest models. Their older keyboards were better, but they were also substantially thicker than the current models. _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
