MS Office Arrives on the Linux Desktop

Source: Desktop Linux

CodeWeavers' new CrossOver Office product delivers on the long-standing goal of the Wine project : making it easy for anyone to successfully install and run Windows software on Linux systems, using a simple point-and-click process. It works so well, and the Windows programs that it currently supports run so smoothly, that it makes me feel slightly guilty -- as though I'm somehow cheating.

"When I first defenestrated my desktop computer last May, I fully expected to face some level of hardship on an ongoing basis. And after nearly a year of using Linux exclusively as my desktop OS, I have become quite accustomed to a variety of application compromises on a daily basis. A sort of grin-and-bear-it situation.

"Even my extremely rare use of one or another of Microsoft's Office programs under Wine has been hampered by the far-from-optimal Wine installation on my machine. I couldn't print, for example, from any Wined Office programs. PowerPoint had illegible fonts and often crashed. Word also suffered from font problems and misbehaved in various and sundry ways. Also, although I had at least some success running Windows programs that were lying around on my no-longer-booted Windows partition, I hadn't a clue how to install any new Windows software packages on my system from a CDROM, or from a downloaded installation script...