Office-Worker Linux: It's Here and It Works

A few weeks ago, dot.kde.org featured a great why-should-this-be-amazing story about Linux being used as the day-to-day desktop operating system for city employees in Largo, Florida. Roblimo got a chance to see the system in action to find out how ordinary office workers are proving that the old "Linux is tough to use" shibboleth is nothing but FUD, and how a medium-sized city is saving buckets of money by minimizing the tax dollars spent on licenses and hardware. Oh, and they've also pre-empted the kind of costs (in hassle and money) that can face any organization that Microsoft suspects may have some licenses out of order. This is the kind of thing every elected official should have politely waved in his or her face by concerned taxpayers. The Largo system uses KDE on Red Hat, but since both KDE and Gnome are paying much attention to user interface, similar systems could easily be running on various combinations of hardware / distribution / desktop system.

Comments

hahahahahaha

[jon_c]

I just installed Win2k and Redhat 7.2. Both bootable cdroms, both on mix match newish machines:

From first POST to "installed":

Linux: 35 min
Win2k: 45 min

Time to get drivers up to speed.

Linux: 0 min (had all my stuff)
Win2k: 25 min (nvidia, creative)

Time to get Quake3 running

Linux: 5 hours (still doesn't work right)
Win2k: 10 min

Time to get my RAID ATA-100 card working

Linux: 0 (it doesn't work)
Win2k: did it at boot, only took 2 min

-Jon

I am trying to do the same, but...

[mwillems]

Being both CTO of a small company (100+ employees on 3 continents) and husband of a non-technical wife :), I am desperately trying to do the same in our company, and at home. Seeing the roadblocks I am hitting may be interesting to some of you.

I see two types of objection to switching.

The "Necessary Condition" objections are mainly "Office", "Outlook", and "IE". Which is, alas, what everyone spends all day using. And until MS gets spilt up, this will not change. But also "that new accounting package", "my scanner", "our new CRM software", "our ERP project", and so on. And these are actually much harder to overcome. I think maybe we can identify a small group of users who do not use accounting, ERP, CRM etc. If we have to change all those, implementing Linux would actually cost us a lot of money.

Eh, before you say it:

StarOffice etc do not work well enough. Always some problems converting Word and Excel files.

VMware is slow, but it also defies the entire object (you still have to pay for an MS license)

Anyway, then there's the...

"Usability" objections. These are easy to fix in time - or they should be. But we are not there yet! I just spent a whole weekend setting up a new desktop machine for myself - Athlon 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM, RedHat 7.1. I had to do a kernel upgrade before it would see my Envidia graphics card. I still cannot print to my samba printer. And having installed machines ([pre-]CP/M, DOS, Win, Novell, Linux) for 20 years, I am not new to PCs or to Linux, but I still cannot figure out how to rewrite the Gnome/Ximian menus! And the config tool core-dumps: I have had 20-odd core dumps in the first day alone. And the lack of "OLE" drives me mad - an experienced PC user spends his life cutting and pasting, and the lack of this in common Linux desktop environments are a real obstacle.

So now I am looking for small groups of "expert users". Our (mainly hardware-) engineers come to mind first. But I am looking hard for real interoperability so we can roll out across the company. My estimate: 2 years out. I hope I am wrong.

Re:Then do your job for once

[Lumpy]

That would be nice, and in your world it probably is true. But in the corperate world it dont work that way...

we run 3 seperate vertical apps that require, (that's right REQUIRE) administrator access to the machine. Now this is the Traffic and Billing software (also requires Admin access to the SQL server!) which by the way is the largest T&B software package out there... it is the de-facto standard in media, you use it, discussion over.

Second we have an AVID. everything MUST be run as administrator. Dont log in and use as admin? too bad.. you don't get to work.

finally. I have a nice self updating Software package for the sales software suite. Now I am 1 IS/IT guy that supports 3 offices spread about 2 hours apart and over 100 machines. If I were to do it your way I need to spend every thursday and friday installing software via VNC or by drivig there.

It may work for you in your small computing environment, but in a large scale corperate environment NT cannot be configured to keep the cluebies from demolshing the hardware....

Oh, and management responds to my request to reprimand users that trash their desktop pc's?
"What did we hire you for? go fix it and shut up."

so... I am doing my job... better than any MCSE ever has here (awarded 3 times for productivity and excellence) and NT cannot do what I need. Linux can. Hell Linux can force the user to drop everything in their user directory (documents and files) instead of spreading documents all over the machine. NT? not possible.