I’m considering downloading “Star Office” from Sun Microsystems. It’s supposed to be a replacement for Microsoft Office and do just as much, but reportedly better. It’s free (as opposed to MS Office which is fairly pricey); the downside is that it’s a 80-105 meg download.
Has anyone else used this and can report on whether it’s worth the time?
I tried it once, and thought it was pretty good. My needs were pretty much taken care of by MS Word, which I already owned because it came with my PC, so I uninstalled Star Office only to reclaim the space.
Since you are concerned about the dload time, I’m assuming you are using a 56k phone modem. I once dloaded a 90+ game demo on my 56k modem successfully overnight, so maybe if you kick it off before you go to bed it will be waiting for you in the morning.
Pros: Nice program. Fairly complete, is I recall.
Cons: Takes over your computer. I tried the email just to see how it compared to OE and Outlook Express wouldn’t work right after that, even after I uninstalled Star Office. I finally got everything working right after I deleted everything in the registry that had anything to do with Star Office. One other thing that happened was that every time I tried to open any one of the Star Office applications, it tried to connect up to the net using my dial up. When I downloaded it, it took about 6 hours with my 56K modem.
My 2 cents worth.
I took a look about a year ago (a T1 line in the office makes it a little easier to stomach large downloads). I was fairly impressed, as it seemed to work well and the file compatibility with MS Office files held up in my limited testing of it. My company’s standardized on MS Office products for internal use; I was looking mainly for myself, and would need a version for the Mac to make the best use of it. At that time, Sun still made some pretense to planning for a Mac version; now I find no reference to one on their web site. If I ever get around to setting up a home machine with Linux on it, I’ll definitely be grabbing Star Office to use on it. I’ve even considered, but haven’t yet gotten round to, downloading both the Windows and the Linux versions now and burning them onto a CD to keep around against that time.
As for whether it’s worth a ~100MB download, it’s more than worth the time, assuming you can afford to have your phone line tied up that long (I’m assuming you’re on a dial-up connection or else the download time shouldn’t be much of an issue). Or you could always buy the CD kit from Sun for $39.95; it’s definitely worth much more than that.