Well, I installed the preview packages in Ubuntu on my desktop this morning – just to play with for a few mins. Guess What? It looks like it doesn’t completely suck!

Some of the UI still feels/looks really weird – but that seems to be a legacy of the strange widget stuff that it used to use.

The “File->Send->Document as E-Mail” and “Document as PDF Attachment” are pretty funky things (assuming they link into evo properly).

The presentation module, Impress looks to have improved no-end. 1.1 was sucky (just like PowerPoint). If you’ve ever used Apple’s Keynote, you know how good presentation software can be. The new one looks to be usable and may mean I swear a lot less when preparing presentations.

Although why OO.org has it’s own package manager is totally beyond me.

I do wish the MySQL connectivity worked out of the box though… maybe it’s just this beta (or the fact that when you select OO.org in synaptic, it doesn’t load up all the Java stuff needed for JDBC connectivity, or ODBC).

Note that I still love Gnumeric and Abiword.