Ubuntu On The Business Desktop

rchapman wrote to mention a Mad Penguin story about a consultant who installed Ubuntu on his work PC, and managed to use it for over a month before his boss even noticed. From the article: "This is not a typical review, because you've read enough of those. Instead, lets pretend I'm a typical worker, who just happens to have a soft spot for Open Source software. I want to use Linux, but I have a job to do. The price of Freedom should not be my salary. I don't have time to fiddle, all I care is whether or not it can do what I want, right now. So what do I want out of my system?"

Comments

I worked at a place one

[saskboy]

One time I went to fix someone's Windows computer at work. I found it to be very different from the standard machine image, it was missing something like Microsoft Word. He mentioned that he'd installed linux on the machine, and put Windows back on himself. I didn't know what to do, so I told my boss what I'd seen, and it turns out tinkering with the software in that way, at this company, was a big no-no. I don't know to know what happened to that employee, but thumb screws might have been involved.

Before you tinker with a work computer, ask! You won't like the answer, but there won't be any thumb screws.

Re:Ubuntu hype

[AKAImBatman]

In my experience, there is only one app that makes it impossible for the companies I've worked at to switch over to an alternative OS: Microsoft Access.

Love it or hate it (mostly hate it), it lets companies quickly create interfaces to larger databases. It's so simply and easy to do, that many developers don't realize (or perhaps care) that they'll be paying heavily for their choice later on when either their needs scale beyond Access, or Microsoft releases a new (usually incompatible) version.

Sadly, just about everyone I've spoken with has considered Access support to be unimportant to office conversions. "They should use a real database," they say. While that's a fine stance to take, that doesn't help companies that are already relying on MS Access. And if you take the emulation route to get Access support, you might as well just run Windows in the first place.

It's really too bad that the Access format is so widely ignored. Much of the groundwork has already been laid for reading/writing the format, and StarOffice/OSS have a real chance to make Access work correctly. IMHO, managers given the opportunity to use their existing Access applications on a better platform would jump at the chance to save money and support calls.