OSNews

Ximian has been releasing ooo-build-1.3.x builds for a while
it's meant as a "staging ground for up-streaming patches to
stock OO.o." I think suse's openoffice has been there own flavor since at least 9.0. they used to ship staroffice back when it was free. I Believe they can achieve better office compatibility just by including MS fonts although I am really not sure. They've had a different font engine for a while {fontconfig2?} and I am pretty sure you can write plug-ins for openoffice. Even if those plug-ins aren't required to be open sourced they probably will be.

What I want to no is if 9.3 will boot up faster. It seems like allot of up coming distros will improve it. I don't understand how knoppix, and derivatives, can boot faster than Windows from a CD drive with hardware detection and everything else doesn't.

Also $100 is way, way, too much they need to put commercial software and/or licensed codecs even then I wouldn't go above $50. A new version comes out twice a year and there isn't usually allot of major improvements like you get with Windows or the Mac OS. $160 would get you {but not me cause I'm a student} up to date for a year. $130 gets you the latest Mac OS for a year. $250.00 gets me the latest windows until longhorn {2-3 years} I no this isn't fare to compare Suse against apple and Microsoft just on price but I'm doing It Because you can get almost The same thing{maybe even more} from the hundreds of other free or lower cost distros out there.