Surveying the responses from a Slashdot post won't get you a very accurate sampling, for sure.

I've shared experiences with most of the users here. Sometimes OO does better than Word, even with Word docs, sometimes OO falls flat on it's face with the simplest Word docs.

The reality of OO is that for it to take hold in US (or Europe, I might add) it has to handle Word stuff flawlessly. And the only way to do that is for money (and thus developers) to be thrown at it. The open source community won't do it by will alone as who the heck wants to spend time coding compatibility with Word docs? If Oracle or Google wants to put a real dent in MS they should attack the office suites by pouring in some money to OO. Only then if OO can handle all the old Word docs thrown at it can it be considered a viable alternative. But, even still there are plenty of old business apps that tie-in to the office suites which will require businesses to keep Word (and IE6 God help us) around.

Sorry, I think my pessimism is warranted. As nice as OO is, MS Office and Windows will NEVER be replaced in the US. Might have hope in Europe and elsewhere if only because those folks ought to be peeved enough that their money is going to fund a big US company.

MS Vista was the chance for something like Linux to replace the OS and it didn't happen and it won't EVER happen on PCs. Too much legacy s/w and docs that businesses can count on working in Windows (whatever version.)

I very much hope I have to eat my words, but we will not see Office or Windows anywhere less than ubiquitous on the PC in ten years. Maybe if there will be some new platform like a wearable computer then possibly something like Linux will take hold. The generation growing up now will be less tied to the OS, more tech savvy, and more able to pick up new apps. But on PCs, in the US, Windows isn't going away for a long time.

>> But a cat that only runs 60 miles on a tank of gas would be unacceptable....

I don't know, that would be a pretty cool cat.

Shameless Plug:

I would highly recommend the Fujitsu ScanSnap 510 (or 510M if you're a Mac). It's ain't free and it ain't open source, but it comes with everything you need to scan in large quantities of documents, name them, put them in the folders you want, and create OCR text backed PDF's, so you keep your original files and have "searchable" backed text. It does double-sided scanning at about 15 pages per minute (my real-world estimate).

I just bought the Mac version and have managed to reduce two packed drawers of a file cabinet down to just a few documents of which I wanted to keep the originals. Plus, with them being text backed (per a previous post) I can use Spotlight to search for them.

My next plan is to scan in my old Engineering notes.

Fujitsu is coming out with the 1500, but I don't know much more than it's supposed to be improved. The 510 is fantastic, though. Check out the reviews on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-S510-Sheet-fed-Scanner/dp/B000RUOW66/

Included with the scanner is Adobe Acrobat in addition to ABBYY FineReader OCR software.

No Linux software that I'm aware of, but once you have the files in PDF format you can use them to your liking. They aren't particularly cheap at $450, but I've been very happy with the devices utility.

I had a HP All-in-One as well, but not having a double-sided scanner made it a pain to use.