Tonight I took Toni's advice and downloaded the ISO of Mandriva One, see how far Linux has come in the past few years.
Well, its come along way.
I ran it off of my DVD drive, so it wasn't a complete installation. But boy I had fun with some of the bells and whistles.
It said I needed a driver to run the properly recognized wifi card built into my laptop, which I couldn't get while i was running the system. But it easily recognized my usb drive I shoved in for the test.
Open office easily handled anything created in Wordperfect I threw at it. It also opened Word documents and it's own format created in Windows.
Open office also opened the Impress (think powerpoint) document I had made last week.
I don't feel confident enough yet to do a dual install on this dell laptop I have, or else I would try it.
And I'm not sure it would do everything I need it to do right now, but I was impressed.
And the eyecandy. The 3d graphics and squinching and turning the corners of the desktop to find a new clean one was just sweet.
It seemed to work too. From the media players to the office software, there were lots of sweet details. And i love the details.
Some images for you?
(Click to enlarge)
"Star" menu
Just turn the corner to the next desktop.
Impress runs my presentations. Including my mistakes.
3D squinchability.
And it handled my Wordperfect and Word documents with ease.
During the short time I had with it I was impressed.
But getting things done day by day would be a real test. I gotta work up the nerve to try that.
That looks cool. If I had a pc I'd be tempted. :) And I like the revolving desktop thing. You can buy programs for Mac that do the same thing, but I'm not sure how much I'd use it. I use two monitors, though.
ReplyDeleteI still come across a lot of old files in Word Perfect, which we don't use here anymore (except the county extension offices still use it) and I've found that Open Office and NeoOffice (the port for Mac OSX that's easier to use) both open them with ease.
I'm becoming more and more a fan of open source software. It just makes sense.
The revolving desktop is used for fast user switching in OSX which is quite cool
ReplyDeleteLast week I downloaded and installed The GIMP (open source image editing software). I don't like the interface, but it seems packed with features, certainly more than my aging version of Ulead PhotoImpact. I'd love to have Adobe PhotoShop but there's no way I'm going to shell out that kind of money. The GIMP is free.
ReplyDeletei.e. Like Linda, I'm becoming more and more a fan of open source software.