On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 05:50:37PM +0200, Alon Weinstein wrote:
> > > Because if you open KWord, you can't take it as anything else but a
> > > clone of MS-Word. It looks the same, it feels the same, and it has a
> > > very related name. Every little item on the window's outline
> > just happen
> > > to be exactly where MS-Word put it. This can't be mistaken.
> >
> > So... don't open KWord! I don't use any Linux app which imitates the
> > (broken, IMHO) MS GUI interfaces. Neither KWord, nor evolution, nor
> > openoffice, nor name-your-favorite-MS-application-Linux-clone.
> >
>
> Care to list the alternative options? I can guess Lyx for document creation,
> GIMP for image manipulation, but that's where my list ends. What are the
> options to perform other common tasks:
In addition to what others said (some of which I agree, some of which
I use myself):
>
> -- Email & Organizer (an only-email client is no replacement for Outlook or
> Evolution)
> -- Spreadsheet
1. There are some old-fashioned unix spreadsheets - sc and oleo for
terminals, xspread, and of course the more modern kspread, gnumeric
and others.
2. I personally think that spreadsheets are useful (in terms of being
"the right tool for the job") only in very specific uses. For simple
things, I usually use only text files, and awk+grep+sed to do things
on them (including most things people usually do with a spreadsheet).
For complex things, I usually find complex, sophisticated spreadsheets
much less maintainable than real programs (or scripts). I have heard
horror stories about thousands lines of macros that organizations
depend on and noone knows what's inside them.
> -- Presentations
While I am personally not convinced that you actually need a specific
tool for presentations (rather than whatever you use for "normal"
writing), I can recommend prosper. It's a latex package that is both
easy to use (for latex users), and creates presentations that are both
good-looking and allow some of the interaction people expect from a
presentation tool (when you use Acrobat Reader on its output. Haven't
tried xpdf). For the GUI people, there is also an interface between it
and LyX, which I haven't yet looked at, but I hope is good, at the
famous homepage of Dekel Tzur.
> -- File and web-browsing (i.e Windows Explorer/Konquerer/Galleon)
While I personally use only the shell and its completion for file-
browsing, and lynx (and lately the very recommended skipstone) for
web browsing, no one can say there is lack of stuff for this, some
with radically experimental UIs, such as xcruise (for file browsing)
and lavaps (for process management - "Task manager"). And for the
Norton commander people (one of which I never was), there are at
least mc and git (together with more than 15 Debian packages that
have "file manager" in their one-line description - some even seem
interesting from the description).
>
> Those are the first things that pop to my head, I'm sure there are other
> areas in which most OSS alternatives are merely imitating MS's or any
> commercial vendor's products.
Well, I think I made my point. There _are_ programs with good UIs
that do not imitate Mac/MS. Most of them are not the "common", but
that's life.
>
>
> Alon.
>
>
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Didi
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