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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.
The story about how Mexico was going to deploy Linux in all their schools everywhere...
/. should revisit this city a year or two later when the current support tech leaves and find out if the decision to use Linux is still in place.
Followed up a year later by another story stating that never happened because Linux was too hard to use.
I say
ME, Win2k, 98, XP all have different interfaces! Figuring out how to use them is a pain. People might as well learn to use an interface that works when the time comes to "upgrade", or that poor old computer feels obsolete because MS won't run on it anymore. If me and my wife can use Linux, anyone can.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This story is nothing but mental Linux masturbation. It's an article posted on a Linux oriented website (dot.kde.org), linked to on an admittedly pro-Linux weblog, and being discussed by a group of pro-Linux computer users.
That's great. Let me know when somebody offers up a different opinion, ok?
Nobody can tell me that this story, as good as it may be, is nothing more than screaming "Look, we're great! Let's preach to the choir!!!". Who would even think of visiting dot.kde.org, besides people who already know the benefits of Linux over other OSes? Nobody.
My point is this: We can write all the pro-Linux articles we want on all the pro-Linux websites we want, and it's not going to do a DAMN bit of good because the information is not getting out to the people who need it. You wanna rant and rave about how great Linux is because it saves time and money? Great. Go out there into the real world and try selling that to a company who relies on NT for their technology.
If you can change their views and switch them over to Linux, then and only then can you claim some sort of victory.
Until then, there is no point to these articles, as no new information is being spread and no new minds are being informed. We're talking amongst ourselves, while the world passes us by.
I expect this to be (-1, Flamebait) within 20 seconds of hitting "Submit". Do your worst.
The server we built is a dual-933 with 3GB of memory, and 18GB of disk,this goes for about $9500 USD. Hope you got a tube of KY with that!
I you don't agree, try an experiment, take Redhat 7.1 and Windows and try to install it on a modern machine and see how it compares. My experience is that Linux will probably install, detect and set up all the hardware, reboot once and be up and running. Windows will reboot at least 3 or 4 times in the process, and then you will have to go to the web site for your video card and download the latest drivers, then repeat the process for the sound card, etc.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
You hit the nail on the head. Cost is a major factor when using Linux, as the analysis makes clear.
If you put Linux next to some other operating systems out there for a cost comparison, the conclusions are devastating for Linux.
Linux costs not only more because of the frequent updates which require new cdrom's to be bought if you don't have a high speed Internet connection.
Another factor in Linux cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose loses water, when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally.
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I can go on and on and on, but the message is clear. In this world, there is no place for Linux. It's not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc. The best place it should ever reach is the toy store, and even that would be flattering.