My ex wrote a novel that was published by Viking a few years ago and got a fair amount of critical acclaim.

When she first started working on it, in '99, I gave her my old laptop with Debian and Gedit. She did 50 or so pages, and then decided to move to Word to print it out. All the line-breaks were messed up, and she never forgave me. I did eventually set her up with a nice netbook and Openoffice, but it was too late, and now we're divorced.

She went from Gedit, which she hated to Word, which she hated, to OpenOffice, which she admires for its ability to reproduce all the defects in Word. On a good day, it's a tool, and like any tool, if you use it regularly, at some point you're going to hurt yourself with it.

If anything is a distraction, it's not the editor, cursor, or background color, it's wifi. Get a laptop with a Broadcom chipset, and you'll be incredibly productive.

I still get half the royalties from the book, so buy it and help me pay for my child support.