Also, as an aside, my wife's learning LaTeX for some math courses... she was shocked at how well her OOO Draw files could be converted and opened up in Inkscape, which in turn played nice with LaTeX. Having good compatibility between various small applications actually was surprising to someone used to the closed-source software world.
I have to disagree with everyone here saying that basic MSO interoperability is some impossible goal. If that was the case how has TextMaker achieved such better results?[2] LibreOffice and OpenOffice both have a group of paid developers. While I understand that volunteer wouldn't want to work on this, why can't the paid developers put some effort into this?
[1] https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=96426
[2] http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/office-compatibility...
The compatibility test mentioned above [2] was performed in 2009. According to the LibreOffice release notes a lot of the positioning errors were fixed.
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0-new-features-and-fix...
I don't know how you can claim that there are no serious problems with compatibility when you can't even import word docs that have charts or diagrams in them. This is stuff I was doing for my lab reports in HS and our marketing documents are full of this kind of material. These are not esoterica features we're talking about.
In a vacuum, LibreOffice / OpenOffice are perfectly usable word processors. In fact I prefer the LO UI over MSO's ribbon interface. The problem is MSO is the industry standard. So until they take compatibility seriously, they are going to be relegated to home users.
[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65865
[1] http://pierre.chachatelier.fr/latexit/latexit-home.php?lang=...
The problem is, it's been making sense for a decade now, at least for the office suite. But these wins against Microsoft remain one offs.
There are many reasons for this, but IT professionals are part of the "problem." Someone with a lifetime of MSFT certifications and training can come up with a dozen reasons why open source is bad. He needs to save his livelihood.
— Upton Sinclair
I moved to thunderbird.
The rest of KDE4 caught up to being release standard at about version 4.6 and Kontact looks good but I've become entrenched with TB now.
Evolution will routinely chew on my disk for over thirty seconds before starting up, for no clear reason. It pops up strange error messages about host resolution when I know the host is up just fine and quite reachable. It doesn't atomically handle email moves, so I've closed the client and later reopened it to find messages I've moved right back in their original places.
Many people rant about Open/LibreOffice not being comparable to MS Office, and while there probably is no good replacement for Outlook in Linux (simply from an ease of use standpoint), swriter and scalc provide 99.9% of the features that most people use MS Office for.
Overall, I'm eager for the time when a major US municipality switches over to Linux desktops. It just makes sense.