It doesn’t have all of the same functionality, and there have been times when I have had Word and other documents that were formatted end up being all run together when opended in OpenOffice.

It’s just annoying enough to make me seriously consider spending the $250.00, plus I miss having Outlook.

The same version of OpenOffice is available for Windows PC’s! And it’s FREE!

(gives you a free version of software like MS Word, MS Excel, MS Powerpoint, and MS Outlook (Email) and a Database program.)

Dave – I haven’t tried running Windows in a VM, because my goal was to see if I could run entirely Windows-free. I did run the Cube on the first Ubuntu box, and it worked great. It’s more eye candy than anything else, but very slick.

Anna, Pops, Charles – A lot of the impetus for my doing this is just because I enjoy tinkering with computers and hadn’t done it in a long time. Every couple of years I give Linux another go because I like playing with shiny new toys without having to buy them, and this was one of those years. This time I just happened to blog about it, much to the chagrin of some readers.

I also wanted to know whether I could go Microsoft-free. Windows XP is stable and works great for me, but one day MS will drop it like a ton of hot lead and we’ll be forced to shell out money to upgrade all our PC’s (”we” being home users and businesses) to something that will be very buggy at first and, once it’s really nice and smooth and we all have computers than run it quickly, MS will make us buy the next new thing.

Unless we have an alternative.

Charles – Powerpoint and Excel? The increasingly popular OpenOffice Suite is available for Linux and has applications that do all that, including opening existing Word and Excel files (not sure about PowerPoint). It’s free, too, and yes, that helps the cause.

Ubuntu is just one of many “flavors” of Linux, which has been around since about 1991 when Linus Torvalds released Linux to the open source community. Linux has quite the following on servers in the US, and in all aspects of computing in the global market. It’s still fairly hard to find on the corporate desktop, but in the past year at least one of our customers asked my advice in setting up their Linux desktop machines for a remote desktop connection to their Windows terminal servers. It can save businesses TONS of money in upfront costs (because they can put it on 10 or 1000 desktops for the same low price of nothing), and there are businesses making money providing Linux support.

Simon – I’m glad you’re just geeky enough to understand why I might do this, and I respect your desire to go to Mac. Their OS is Unix-based now and is very similar to Linux, so you won’t be all that far outside the Ubuntu camp, anyway. I would buy a Mac right now if I had the cash and the items above it on my wish list were checked off.

I’m still trying to find the rationale behind the experiment. Maybe it’s anti-Gates driven?

WTF?

This is how my mind perceives the content of your post.

I would liken it to how the adults sound on “Peanuts.”

And that was a pretty bad scan of the two friends up there. (I tried to click on the X in the screen shot of the file browser to close the picture. I feel shame.)

I can’t play with that at work as my Ubuntu runs in a VM under Vista already.

I have to say though, Ubuntu is a great OS. Lots of thought went into it.

BTW, did you get Cube to work yet???