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

Posted by timothy on from the fud-for-thought dept.

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.

2 of 615 comments (clear)

  1. hahahahahaha by jon_c · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

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    this is my sig.
  2. I am trying to do the same, but... by mwillems · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

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    BDOS ERR ON A:>