The great thing about openSUSE is that with KDE it is super stable, great for programming, plays well with Windows (if that's what you want), and is easily upgradeable in place. I use it on a 1999 and 2001 machine on top of my current i7. Highly recommended. Check thegsblog.com for helpful links.

I should know. Some jackass posted a page on some site ten years ago claiming I was a woman, but me mistook me for my assistant, who had a subdomain within my company site. The goddamn thing googles within a top ten hit of my name. To this day I can't live that down and it gets old explaining the whole story. The girl died four years later, which only expanded the conspiracy. TIRING.

This is an interesting discussion because as a writer, I feel for the author when he spends more time formatting and learning the word processor than ever writing. One can lose oneself forever with futzing and tinkering and never get a damned thing done during the day.

However, the UltraEdit Text Editor (www.ultraedit.com) allows not only spacing, justification, and font selection, but will save the document in .txt, .html, or XML formats so that one's content can be imported to any other program. And if this is not your game, check out the sheer speed and simplicity of TextMaker (www.softmaker.de) - it's cheap, fast, will do 90% of what Word does and hey, only takes up 18Mb on your HD!

Either way, you'll spend a minimal amount of time futzing with the program, if at all.