For those of you who've been downloading the OpenOffice.org 3.0 betas and release candidates, there's an alternate build of OO.o that's well worth your attention: Go-oo.

Go-oo is actually the OpenOffice.org build used by Ubuntu, so if you install 8.10 it comes with the Go-oo edition of OO.o 2.4.1 This led me to go dig up the Windows build and try it out, and after some quick and dirty (and wholly unscientific) testing, I'm really impressed. It's fundamentally the same program, but faster -- visibly and noticeably faster to start up, even without the launch-accelerator app. The project appears to be spearheaded by a number of folks at Novell -- nice to see those folks embracing open source in a whole slew of different ways.

Too bad there's no PortableApps version of Go-oo (yet!), but I'm impressed enough with its performance and behavior that I don't mind making a full installation. If you want to check it out, go to http://go-oo.mirrorbrain.org/stable/win32/3.0/ for the most recent version (or http://go-oo.mirrorbrain.org/stable/win32/ for all the builds).

I can't say I'll be weaning myself from Word '07 completely yet, but that day gets closer all the time.

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