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

This reminds me of...

[sheldon]

The story about how Mexico was going to deploy Linux in all their schools everywhere...

Followed up a year later by another story stating that never happened because Linux was too hard to use.

I say /. 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.

Linux surpassed W$ in ease of use long ago

[smartin]

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.