Israeli Gov't Begins Testing Mandrake Linux

DJStealth writes "According to this article on Arutz 7/Israel National News, the Israeli Gov't is beginning to move away from Microsoft and is testing localized versions of Mandrake Linux in the Treasury dept. as the contract with MS expires this month. This all despite a recent defense ministry contact with MS."

Comments

Office 97 functionality

[MoonFog]

From the article:
Microsoft heaped scorn on the Commerce Department's decision to abandon Office for the software alternative. The procurement decision relegated users to second best, said local Microsoft officials, comparing Open Office 1.1 functionality to Word 97

First of all, like has been mentioned numerous times on /., the functionality in Office 97 is sufficient for most users. Very few people use, let alone need, the extra functionality added in the later versions of office.

Second, this just makes Microsoft sound childish. "Our latest product is better, they're just a rip off from our old products"

Re:Office 97 functionality

[mccalli]

First of all, like has been mentioned numerous times on /., the functionality in Office 97 is sufficient for most users.

Indeed. Here I sit in an Office of one of the worlds largest banks and what is my client box? NT 4, Lotus Notes, Exceed and Office 97.

Though I'm no fan of Notes, the above is perfectly sufficent for me to do all the work required. You could switch it all to Linux underneath me and I'd barely notice.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Office 97 functionality

[Anonymous Coward]

My new job in a large corporation came with a brand new Dell desktop running Office 97. It's our corporate standard and nobody misses any of the features of the newer versions of Office.
The only issues anyone has with Office 97 is that it has occasional incompatibilities with later version MS Word files and all of the later version MS Access files.
Fortunately, Open Office can open all of these files and convert them to "standard" MS format. /Mark

Re:Office 97 functionality

[Anonymous Coward]

My productivity is WAY higher using word 6. I've got everything set up just fine; why move all my macros?

Not to mention the fact that, in order to move your macros, they would effectively have to be rewritten! I used to solve quite a few problems for my customers with macros in Microsoft's Office products. One customer, after going through two rounds of this, balked at the third round and started doing the procedures by hand again. How's that for a productivity tool?

Re:Office 97 functionality

[Sire Enaique]

I remember reading a novelist praising EMACS because it is the closest thing to a text-mode Wordperfect one can get today.

OSS Good

[fmlug.org]

Its interesting where I go to school lots of people are only intersted in useing Microsoft products. Because they believe thats all that used so its the only thing worth using. Some people even get very upset that they have to use a term on a unix box to learn how to program and think that the Linux lab is a complete waste of time and space. I happen to tell then that Microsoft probably only has the majority share of users in the US. There are other countries where users dont have money to spend on an OS. I for on think that all governments should use Open Source software because gov's are for the people Y should they not use an os written by the people they protect. I see this as a good thing and hopefully someday the US will wake up and see the light. Now this post makes me seem like I am saying windows sucks and Linux/BSD rocks, well maybe it is. I believe in using the app the does the best job. Ok if you read this and like it good if not sorry about the rant. :)

Re:Power to tha Duck

[sniggly]

I agree, I like mandrake and wish them all the best.

Redhat spawned fedora, fedora is "unsupported" and what remains are high priced RHELs. Fedora has a very strong community around it but its stated purpose is to be a labrat for RHEL.
Suse never had ISOs for download which is their right as a company but a linux distribution usually is more than the company doing the distributing. Now that suse is a Novell company we'll have to see how true to the OSS Suse remains.
Sun is a new linux distributor and we'll just have to see how true to the community they will be. After all they could have called it the Sun Gnome Desktop (which it is) instead of the Sun Java desktop (which it isn't as much)...

Mandrake is the one remaining big linux distribution (still the biggest in terms of desktop install base) that is tightly interwoven with its supporting community.