Okay, so CrossOver Office 1.0 isn't perfect. I ran into glitches here and there, and the most frustrating was definitely not being able to import data from Outlook on my Windows machine. PowerPoint's a bit funny with pulling up other application windows whenever a dialog box opens, and there were other little problems that popped up and went away as I went about doing my thing.

It's a little sluggish with SuSE 7.3 on my slowest Linux box (a Pentium III 450MHz machine with 256MB RAM) with The GIMP running alongside it, so it could use a bit of speeding up. Keep in mind I type over 82 words-per-minute, though the dialog boxes and mouse clicks sometimes lagged behind as well as the text. I'd definitely want a faster machine with more RAM on a machine where I was using this program to do some serious work.

CodeWeavers has done an incredible job here. There's still a few little bumps in the road, but as they continue to iron out the small bugs remaining in the supported applications and add more programs to the mix, the Linux world will find itself in the same situation that the Apple Macintosh world found itself in years ago: able to utilize an emulator program to run many of the Windows programs that had never been ported over to the Macintosh market.

There's even a feature that allows you to mass-produce all of the product settings and roll an RPM or DEB package containing a script that will apply all of your setup choices, including MIME associations, on any number of Linux boxes. Check out the documentation for other cool things. I just don't have enough room to cover them all.

When I asked company founder and CEO Jeremy White what message he'd like to get out to Linux users, he said a few interesting things but I only have room for one quote, so I'll pick this one: "I think that all of the people who called for the demise of the Linux desktop are about to discover how very, very wrong they were." And you know what? I agree.

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