SoftMaker Office 2008 for Linux vs. WinXP

[invenit]

Check out a new review of Softmaker Office at http://www.linux.com/feature/153229

Last week, I downloaded an earlier version of Softmaker's software for WinXP after I saw the link at http://lifehacker.co...tweight-office-suite . Softmaker offered me a generous upgrade deal for the 2008 version a few days later and I bought it. Textmaker runs rings around any other word processor that I've used (in WinXP). Rock solid. (Zaine Ridling covered all the good stuff in his review of word processors.) Moreover, it comes with BasicMaker (BM's manual runs to 300+ pages! (Manuals for other office components are even larger)), spreadsheet, presentation software. 

OTOH, I do about 50% of my computing in Ubuntu 8.10, and abiword 2.6.4 works really well in Ubuntu. OpenOffice.org is also plenty fast in linux. (I dual boot on a Dell 3000 running at 3 GHz with 1 GB RAM.) Neither is very fast in WinXP.

Kudos to Softmaker for doing a linux port. Not ready to make a switch in linux--though I did test it on my machine--but they definitely got my attention for WinXP.

[zridling]

I'm not sure I've seen such an offer -- take the older version for free in the hope that you will pay to upgrade to the newer version. Interesting angle. I've always loved SoftMaker Office, especially TextMaker. However, SoftMaker's upgrade cycles suffered in large part because they ported it to so many OSes. Very happy the '08 version runs ODF.