Live Writer works like Microsoft Office (or OpenOffice Writer), once you're done writing your document, you can simply Save, and/or Publish to your blog.
I have Live Writer installed on my XP slice that I run on my linux laptop. Running Virtual Box does take away CPU when running XP - and frankly I wanted to be able to use Linux for all my needs.
I was disappointed. After using several offline desktop oriented blog clients for Linux , the verdict is that none of them offer the features that LiveWriter does.
This is the User inteface - it is minimal, does not have off line save options, cannot be used by any serious blogger.
If you're looking to post casual updates, almost tweets or micro blogs - from your desktop then this may be a fit. But why bother? Just get a Twitter account and use TweetDeck that runs on Adobe Air.
GTKBlog
For some reason GTK blog looked attractive but would never run on Ubuntu10.10 - I did not bother to find out why. I did get a screen shot from their website.
rohit@lenovo:~$ blogtk
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/blogtk", line 14, in <module>
import gtkhtml2
ImportError: No module named gtkhtml2
ScribeFire
So I proceed to install ScribeFire - which is an add on to both Chrome and Firefox.
Let's you open it from Chrome (or Firefox) and lets you manage the text offline.
You CANNOT place images in Offline mode. This is a huge flaw.
Drivel Journal Editor
Drivel has more features but does not handle images in offline mode with any grace.
Drivel, too cannot manage images without being connected to the Internet.
Conclusion
None of the Desktop Blog clients on Linux manage images offline with any grace. LiveWriter from Microsoft is superior to all Linux Desktop clients that I have used.
If you were to still choose, I would go with ScribeFire. Hope that someone will take the time to upgrade or write a new Desktop blog client in 2011.
