"Promising projects" means that I believe these projects are both (a) well-thought-out and (b) making significant progress. I've organized them more or less in order of current usability, with the most usable first.

Note to developers:
If you think I have overlooked a good project, feel free to explain to me why you think it should be listed. I'm open to persuasion, but please be aware that I have deliberately chosen to include only a limited selection of software projects.

KWord

KWord is part of KOffice, which in turn is part of KDE, the K Desktop Environment. The website says you can already write simple documents with it, and the screenshots look mighty fine! Presumably you need to install KDE in order to use KWord.

Jump to the KOffice Home Page

GWP

GWP stands for GNOME Word Processor. Just as KWord is the word processor for the K Desktop Environment, GWP is the word processor for the (competing) GNOME desktop; as above, you probably need to get at least the basic GNOME software in order to use GWP.

Visit the Hungry Programmers' GWP page
or the GNOME project

AbiWord

Off in another corner of the net, far removed from the desktop wars, AbiSource is working on their code for a lean but high-quality word processor. This project seems to be just getting started, but I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

Go to the Developer's page at AbiSource

other

If you couldn't find what you wanted here, try the following:

Linux Links
-- or, for the latest development news, Freshmeat