Abiword 2.6 -- You've come a long way, baby!

What is it with these people? They claim to be experienced Linux users- so they should know that there is always a lag of weeks to months between a new software release, and when it appears in distribution repositories.

Abiword is not a Microsoft Word clone.

OpenOffice isn't nearly as slow as the author claims- I run it on my old Thinkpad with a 1.6 mobile Pentium processor, which hardly ever gets out of first gear because it is terrified of using any actual battery time, and 256 megs RAM. It is slow when the program first opens, but after that it doesn't take any 15 seconds to open a blank new page.

These folks is weird. Abiword is very nice, though it needs to support ODF natively and a lot better.

Agree about OOo. That information is badly outdated. On my computers it takes 4-5 seconds to open the first time, and even less the second time.

As for getting into the repositories, it's not like Abiword gets the same priority as a security fix for the kernel.

Yeah, I use Abiword for most of my light word processing. And OOo is anything but slow these days, the latest versions have improved massively.

I do wish as well that they would get the ODF support internally instead of in the plugin pack, but it works well enough for what I do with it.

One of the issues that comes up less and less often for me regarding AbiWord or something similar is getting a decent non-Micro$haft-WinWord to work on PC's w/ much less resources than tuxchick's above. As in a Pentium I or sub-200MHz AMD K5/6 CPU, less than 128MB RAM, and M$ Windblows either 95/NT4.0 ?

WordPad doesn't cut it, and AbiWord can be hard to find or just not install/load well once found. AbiWord would be better than WordPerfect (certainly better than WinWord!)

sheesh flufferbeer, that's barely a low-end video card these days :) A lot of word processors have come and gone over the years. Jarte is supposed to super-wonderful for windows users, yes even antiques like yours. I haven't tried it my own self: http://www.jarte.com/features.html

I run Abiword in Linux, OpenBSD and Windows. Of all the versions I've tried, Debian does it the best, and by that I mean that they include the spell-checker.

The Windows version is pretty darn good. I have OO but almost never use it. Abi does everything I need, which isn't a whole hell of a lot.

That being the case, I'm deliriously happy with Abiword.