Ubuntu

Black box perspective - What is practical benefit of GG over FF?

Asked by Piet Beukes

Hi
this is not a question to pick an argument - I'm also not technical so have little understanding of technical benefits - I do assume that there will be various technical benefits and great strides forward for installing GG over FF on the technical side.

But on a practical side: what are the benefits of GG over FF?

Look at it from my side
Everthing that had to work, did work in FF - OOffice 2 worked well, synaptic helped me upload and install some programs which I wanted to install.

Now with GG (which I had my hands full uploading even though I bought a GG DVD release from an official supplier - it took me a week and I'm still struggling - but thanks to the wonderful help from the Ubuntu answers volunteer group everything is slowly getting back to normal) I have some doubts over the wisdom of uploading GG (I have to say I did learn more in the process of the update which is knowledge never lost and will benefit me in future).

But OOffice 2.3 works as OO2.0 did -so nothing gained. (perhaps there are again technical benefits in OO2.3 but practically it is still good - whether OO2.0 or OO2.3.
But now I do not have synaptic any more - what has come in its place? I still do not have an updated firefox or thunderbird - it was not included in the GG DVD. With FF I was not able to install the updated firefox or thunderbird and now I dont know if I will be able to install it with GG either. As of now I have not yet been able to test this but will probably be able to do so as soon as the internet part of the update of my laptop is working again. But I'll try

But looking at GG from a black box perspective (where the technicalities does not matter, only if the system works matters), I cannot see that I have benefitted from installing GG over FF.
Am I missing something?
rusty

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Revision history for this message
Clóvis Fabrício (nosklo) said : 		#1

You get speed. GG is faster than FF.
You get tracker search. You get all gnome new stuff, Evolution now warns you if you send mail with word attachment and don't attach anything, has backup, has 7-day views. Image viewer is better. You can easily fill PDF forms now.
Better password management, better lockout manager, people can now leave messages to you when your computer is locked.
There is new software avaliable to install which wasn't present in FF.

Openoffice 2.3 is much better!! You have new charts, with improved appearance, new colour palette. The scaling of axes has been changed to give better results automatically. 3D charts are greatly enhanced in appearance, and easier to create. New chart types include '3D exploded pies' and 'exploded donuts' (watch out Homer Simpson). There is an improved data editor for charts that use their own data (e.g. within Impress).
The way Writer displays various page images has been improved. There is a new filter for exporting documents to MediaWiki ("Wikipedia") format
Calc now supports inline matrix/array constants in formulas. Summation has been made more powerful and more intuitive. The display of error values has been made more user-friendly. Compatibility with Microsoft Excel has been improved with workarounds for cotangent functions (supported in Calc, missing from Microsoft Excel).
Base continues to evolve as a fully-fledged OpenOffice.org application in its own right, with its windows all having their own size, position, etc settings. The Report Builder, available as extension on http://extensions.services.openoffice.org, now has additional facilities for expert users. There is a greater support for keyboard shortcuts throughout Base.
Draw includes a number of accessibility improvements and support for .png images when exporting to .html documents
The much-loved 'move along curve' animation feature has been re-introduced, despite claims that over-use could easily create sea-sickness among sensitive members of an audience.
Language support has been improved for a further fourteen languages, building on OpenOffice.org's already impressive language support.
There are a number of new features available to developers of OpenOffice.org extensions, and a one click link to a new extensions repository.
Writer, Calc, Draw, and Impress now allow users to preview their work within a browser before exporting it to .html format. The default security level for Macro Security has been changed to High, to make it difficult for users to run possibly malicious macros 'without thinking'.

Synaptic package manager is still there, you must be having some kind of issue. Try running it on a terminal by typing: gksu synaptic
If you can't find it, just install it: sudo apt-get install synaptics

These changes, I have pulled from the project's web sites. I am sure almost all software has improvements from FF to GG. 6 months of development are a lot on opensource.

Revision history for this message
Piet Beukes (zabear1) said : 		#2

I really appreciate your assistance
thanx
Rusty

Revision history for this message
Clóvis Fabrício (nosklo) said : 		#3

You're welcome.

You should go to https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/16909 and mark my answer as the correct one, so people will know how your question was answered.