For now, I'd mark it as experimental and not trust anything too important to it until it establishes a clean track record. An Alternative View Linux is a quixotic mix of new and old. Aside from ease of use, however, these products essentially deliver end results that were already available in Unix thirty years ago, and they frequently don't do as good a job of it. There are many Unix and Linux veterans who eschew word processors altogether in favour of plain-text typesetting and documentation tools. Unix has traditionally been a programmer's haven.
Plain text is open to direct programming.
Binary files, such as Word, WordPerfect, StarOffice and KWord files are not. Then there is the issue of tools. For many vets vi and emacs are extensions of the mind in the way that high-quality hand tools are part of a master cabinet maker's spiritual makeup. We'll examine products that allow you to use your favourite text editor to create files that can produce results you might have thought possible only by using a high-end desktop publishing program such as FrameMaker or PageMaker. And we'll see how text-based documents such as SGML and XML, have come full circle to be, once again, at the leading edge of technology.