Lotus Symphony - do I hear a bum note?

Back when I tried OpenOffice 1.1 (my first encounter with it), I thought it was pretty decent. It was the one and only time I blue-screened a Win XP system, but I forgave it for being new(ish) and open source. Since OpenOffice got to 2.2 and later versions it has been rock solid and more useful than ever. With the exception of Excel, I don't think that Microsoft can justify the price of its Office suite anymore. So when IBM announced that they'd be creating their own open source office alternative to replace their aging (to put it mildly) Smartsuite package, I got interested.

Along came Symphony - which I started using towards the end of summer '07. I also stopped using it around that time too. Why? As a test run, I created a text document, and then tried to convert it to PDF. Symphony crashed... Hard. When I tried to restart it, it wouldn't. I realised that this was because the Eclipse javaw.exe process it was wrapped up in had hung on after the rest of Symphony had terminated, so I had to kill it. Then, lo and behold, I managed to get the application started again - and what did I find? A recovered unsaved document? No.

So, my first experience with Symphony was not entirely a success. You could even say it was a dismal failure, but that would be too lenient. The truth is that, although it didn't crash on me again since (mostly because I've barely used it), it doesn't offer a single advantage over OpenOffice 2.x. In fact, it seems to have less going for it in any respect that, in my opinion, counts. Firstly, Eclipse is a pig, so Symphony has a very large footprint - and this extra application tier just means that there's more that can go wrong. Secondly, Symphony is only based on the 1.1.x engine of OpenOffice - so it's not as stable and not as functional as OO 2.4.

All things considered, it's not so much a symphony as a dirge.

Read the linuxjournal article
and then here's a slightly less scathing review (thanks to muglatte)