Lindows gets Star Office 6.0 as first commercial offering

AND THE FIRST COMMERCIAL application available to run on the operating system named Lindows will be... StarOffice 6.0.

The once-free, downloadable office suite was snapped by by would-be Microsoft nemesis Sun last year. Sun now sells the suite to Windows users for $76.

Lindows users can get the package included in their $99 subscription to Lindows.com. As Michael Robertson, former founder of MP3.com and now Chief Executive Officer of Lindows.com, puts it: "We believe that people should pay no more than $99 for their general computing software needs, and adding StarOffice to our Click-N-Run Warehouse will provide our members with a comprehensive business solution that is comparable in power with Microsoft Office but at a fraction of the cost."

Here's the 'click and run warehouse'.

"Even though we are adding StarOffice, which represents a $75 value, we are maintaining our $99 membership fee," he adds, generously.

For Sun, Mike Rogers, general manager for Desktop and StarOffice, said Sun was proud to team up with Lindows.

Lindows.com says it plans to ship its Lindows operating system later this year. The Lindows OS is currently available as a preview version here or pre-installed in some systems, available from Wal-mart, as we reported here. µ

Of course you can download OpenOffice for free, and it's the same codebase. And everything else you can get in the $99 package from Lindows can be had for free off the net, and most other distros include them on the install CD's.

So you could a) buy a Lindows sub for $99 b) buy a Mandrake disc for $35, or c) download Mandrake, RH, et al for free and burn your own CDs.

Comparing ease of use between Lindows "Click and Run Warehouse" and other options shows no advantage to Lindows. Mandrake has RPMdrake, which will handle security and feature updates over the net pointy clicky style, Red Carpet runs on any distro and has a nice gui, and Debian's apt-get is loved by many.

While I love to see people taking on MS, I'd rather they did it with a better product at a better price.

What you are paying for with the various Linux distros, is convenience. Everything is packaged in a nice and neat bundle. There is actually some support, both on-line and on the phone, that comes with your purchase.

A lot of this is geared towards nabbibg those Windows/Mac users who would probably be much better off with a pencil and a pad of paper.

Those in the know can scrounge around the 'Net, configure/install their own RPMs and Kernal varients. Those on the outside-looking-in are left confused with dozens of Man-pages to peruse before they can even get their box up and running, much less running well.

The last time I installed a linux, I got a 3 disk Mandrake set from Cheapbytes for less than US$10.00 (legal at that price) including shipment from the US to me in Canada.

I stuck the first disk into the cdrom drive and the Mandrake installer partitioned my drive non-destructively to make room for linux, installed linux including a whole lot more applications than can be found on a Windows disk (that is why there are 3 disks, there are a lot of applications installed by default and a lot more that you can choose to install).

For the average user, you don't need more. If you are a power user you may want to find some of the many applications and utilities to download, but you would have to do so on Windows as well.

The KDE desktop comes up by default, but there are 2 other desktops which you can also choose.

For anything beyond the basic desktop user applications, I find Windows harder to use than Linux.

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