LibreOffice and SSD Netbooks


I haven't written up a more techie relating posting in a while so I thought I would speak what has been on my mind lately. I was reading in eWeek and online about how Oracle has been stalling further development of OpenOffice.org and how Linux distributions like Ubuntu are therefore switching to the fully open LibreOffice variation of the free office suite (Ubuntu 11.04, the "Natty Narwal", will ship with LibreOffice 3.3.1). Therefore I decided to uninstall OpenOffice.org from my Ubuntu desktop and switch over to LibreOffice since it was a pretty easy procedure to do using apt-get. I have used both Writer and Calc and it pretty much feels the same to me as OpenOffice.org. They have posted the latest fixes and features in version 3.3.1 which sound nice but I have never really needed to use them. It is more about future enhancements and support by an open source community as opposed to the current differences between the two projects. If Red Hat, Canonical and Novell are all going that same path as preferring LibreOffice over OpenOffice.org (as well as that tiny little company known as Google), I am not sure who will still be using OpenOffice.org in a few years.

On a completely unrelated technical matter, I was looking for a netbook for one of our faculty members to take on trips, and I noticed that none of them seem to ship with solid state drives anymore, with all of them using standard spinning magnetic hard disks. I thought SSD's were the way of the future and would be used more and more in laptops and netbooks as they became larger and less expensive. But now I cannot find any netbooks with SSD's installed unlike just a year or so ago. When did this happen? It you look at NewEgg.com they must have about 120 different netbooks, and none of them have a hard drive smaller than 120GB. The vast majority (104 of 120) have a 250GB or larger hard drive which seems much more than you really need for a netbook. Our faculty member just wanted a small netbook for checking e-mail, web browsing, typing up letters and working on papers. She does not need a 250GB hard drive for that! What happened to the old ASUS eee PC models that always used to ship with an 8GB or 16GB SSD? Now all the eee PC models seem to have magnetic hard drives. I must have missed the memo on why they got rid of all the SSD models.

Comments

Bryan H said…
I'm using 50GB on my netbook...
8:12 PM
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