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Why Free Software is a Hard Sell
jeffro writes "Dont know if this has been submitted yet, but the Independent news UK has a rather newbiesh article on the ups and down of Linux software as a free alternative to Windows.
"Perhaps Linux shouldn't be regarded as an operating system at all, but more as a sophisticated multi-player game with a large number of enthusiastic players. You can lose yourself in Linux for hours, tweaking here, updating there. It's great fun if you like that sort of thing. But if you need to produce a document, spreadsheet or presentation, you're still likely to be able to do it faster and better by sticking with the Microsoft devil you know.""
Bullshit. Anybody who creates documents/reports for a living wants the computer to do all of the work of formatting/typesetting for them. Unix has ALWAYS shined at this (troff, nroff, LaTeX, etc.) In a windows word processor not only do you have to do the formatting yourself, but also you have to fight with what the word processor thinks is best, along with the crappy interface that cannot be tailored to the way you work, and the instability (which is getting better, but far from where it needs to be).
And for your resume or quick note/letter, or quick spreadsheet star office works beautifully. And (although they do) no business should EVER be using spreadsheets for day-to-day information gathering, storage, and retrieval, especially if they share that data! That's what a database server is for, and again, a Unix solution shines here.
And for printing, we now have cups. Very powerful and flexible.
So what was this guy's point again?
"But if you need to produce a document, spreadsheet or presentation, you're still likely to be able to do it faster and better by sticking with the Microsoft devil you know."
Bullshit. Microsoft Office is a hideous, convoluted, unintuitive mess. I grew up on WordPerfect, Lotus, Wordstar, AmiPro/Wordpro, and a host of other GOOD productivity software. It never crashed, I never had any problems with "Microsoft Installer" files becoming corrupted and forcing regular reinstalls, etc.. I have and always will be better off working with good software (Lately StarOffice and Appleworks.) and avoiding Microsoft Office like the plague it is. Microsoft Office only got where it is because Microsoft got the US Government hooked on it, and from there it spread to government contractors and finance companies throughout the business world, and by strongarming OEMs into including it with their systems.
Eventually the world will wake up and realize that MS Office is CRAP, and that people really only use it because Microsoft wants you to!
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