Constructing a Windows-Less Office

joewakeup writes "This article at CRN analyses why today is the best time to consider building a pure Linux information system, from servers to... desktop. Among all the arguments, one of the arguments is the low cost of Linux offerings compared to Windows based-solutions. Worth a read."

Comments

But Microsoft abuses the users because they can

[Walter Bell]

The article raised many good points and showed the many enormous advantages of using Linux over Windows. As somebody who has tried to do the same for my home PC, however, I realize that there are some substantial hurdles to completely replacing Microsoft products. Why is that? Well, think about why Microsoft is able to get away with screwing their users: the market allows it. If users actually had a choice, don't you think they would have already taken it? Why wants to be burdened with spyware, the upgrade treadmill, file format incompatibilities, GPFs / blue screens, cost, and general instability? If 95% of PC users really had a choice, why would they ever choose Windows?

Well, here are my own personal reasons why I have a Windows box in the middle of my shelf of Linux boxen:

• Mail. I need to access a Microsoft Exchange mail server. Alternatives, anyone?
  
• Office documents. StarOffice, Koffice, and the like don't even make an attempt to read Powerpoint documents correctly. Word docs render correctly on a good day, and show up formatted wrong and in Arabic typefaces on a bad day. Staroffice and Koffice required me to upgrade my memory and CPU. I have no choice and businesses have no choice but to accept that Microsoft file formats are the standard. We can't turn down customers just because they send us .doc's instead of .ps's.
  
• Web browsing. I love Mozilla and it is getting better every day. I used to use Konqueror quite a bit and it was fairly decent as well. But neither browser works as well as IE, just because almost every web page on the Internet was designed with IE users in mind. Don't believe me? Ask your average artsy web designer what Linux is and he will probably give you a blank stare.
  
• Games. The majority of my favorite games will not run on Linux.
  

I love Linux - it is the best all-around OS I have ever used. Linux isn't the problem; third parties are the problem. Microsoft made the brilliant move of leveraging its monopolies to reinforce each other and it has worked like a charm. I'd drop Windows in a heartbeat but M$ gets my upgrade dollars because I really have no choice. And I suspect that any office that tried to transition to Linux will fail miserably for the same reasons. Linux just isn't ready for widespread desktop use.

~wally

I don't buy it..

[Xzzy]

..because I've lived it.

A year ago I was working at a smallish startup. Cheap was king, so linux was the desktop of choice.. except for a couple PHB's who wanted their Outlook and were running NT.

It was a hassle, day in and day out. In the interests of brevity I'll leave out details, but suffice to say that linux is NOT the best choice. This isn't to suggest that there's a "best" choice out there, I'm just saying linux is still too unstable and too quirky to make life easy for a desktop support guy.

What you save in software costs ends up in costing support staff more in terms of headaches. "Cost" is not always defined by how hard something hits the pocketbook..

Re:A catch-22.

[Hostile17]

twice as slow as Win2K/XP on the same hardware

I have not found this to be true at all. XP is a complete dog on my laptop (Dell Inspirion 3800, Celeron 500 and 192 MB of RAM), while RedHat Linux 7.2 runs just fine.

Re:Dreamweaver equivalent?

[kindbud]

A gun. And a bullet.

Re:on X

[seann]

putty to.the.computer.at.home
login: root
password: eatMYpenisCHUrN

hit:#! export DISPLAY=my.computer.at.school:1
hit:#! kwrite ~/public_html/default.php 2>/dev/null &

mmm, remote x windows.