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Tales of Conversion - Using Ubuntu at Work
madgreek writes "Here is a short story about my switch to Ubuntu from XP at work. I have been Microsoft-free for 3 months now at a Microsoft heavy shop. Few people know I am using Open Office and Linux. I create countless documents that people open using Word, Excel, PPT and nobody can tell that they were created using Open Office. From the article: 'When I first started my experiment I was trying to keep it a secret out of fear of attacks from angry Microsoft worshipers (especially from the admins and desktop support). What I am finding out is that most of the folks that I was hiding from are sick and tired of supporting Windows and are proponents of Linux. Several of them are using Linux at home. One of the guys I talked to has Vista and XP installed on his laptop. He swaps out the hard drive when switching between OS's.'"
Moral of the story is: the reason why Linux doesn't have a wide user base is because even though it is supposed to be the distro for noobs, it's still not user-friendly enough for the mass market.
A-Bomb
Y'know, there's such a proverb: "To piss off the bus driver, I'll buy a ticket and then walk all the way instead of taking the bus". That's what you are doing.
As long as you are the only guy in your company who does things "your way" as opposed to "their way", as long as you use OSS yourself but adapt it to MS software when used for any collaborative purpose, you are helping nobody and doing nothing but wasting time and being an extra pain in the ass for the sysadmin.
Neither Microsoft itself nor it's dominance is impacted if the whole company uses it's software on the main basis. You can be the black sheep and avoid MS stuff, but look: you STILL have to synch with that MS server, STILL have to produce documents in MS format, STILL have to synch with MS print servers... And so on and so forth. Neither MS's grip on the company (be it the technological slavery, the lack of following standards, or the money going down the MS drain) are reduced by your activism.
Not only that, but you completely and utterly defeat the purpose of using OSS if you are forced to adapt to MS on every single turn. What's the advantage in open document format if you have to produce all documents in Word format anyways? As much as MS formats are bad, even you have to admit that MS software does a better job at following THEIR OWN formats than you can do at following THEIRS.
If you want to be truly MS free, get your company to drop MS. Get EVERYONE to kick the habit. Work to reduce or stop corporate-level contracts with MS. Make open standards the CORPORATE basis, instead of using OSS as a slave to closed source. THEN, and ONLY then, will you actually make a difference, and only then your actions will actually have some result instead of being a waste of time.
Yes, you made your point that you can have a rose grow in the middle o a pile of turd... But guess what, as nice as the rose smells, it won't make the turd stink less unless the said turd is removed.
Some quotes from your sig:
Ok, now please go ahead and educate us on bias.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
While i agree that linux isn't ready for most business desktops and certainly isn't ready to the general public, that kind of logic escapes me. why SHOULD linux be focusing all this effort on being windows compatible? isn't the purpose to escape windows? it's also majorly retarded to sit there and proclaim linux is somehow inferior because windows is compatible with itself.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
You just cant ignore compatibility with Windows. People will and do use different operating systems then one another, this is why you have to spend some amount of time making sure both can work with the same material.
Since Windows is the dominant OS as of today it is only logical for another OS to have some form of compatibility with Windows. An example would be applications for OSX or Linux that are used for XYZ, XYZ should/would like to make sure the application for Windows that is similar to XYZ can open XYZ files and also save them. This is only common sense, with your logic it would be like Apple only designing the iPod to work with Windows.
I think you maybe don't understand the purpose of compatibility. It's not about escaping Windows or Linux or OSX, it's about making sure whatever OS person "A" uses can create and share things with person "B" who uses another OS.
I personally don't give a sh*t what operating system and/or applications I'm using so long as the combination DOES WHAT I WANT. In my personal situation, that means Linux on the server, OS X on my desktop and laptop, and Windows in a VM so I can run a few Windows-only apps when I need them. But I don't use any of them because I have some sort of emotional or religious attachment to them.
There is only one way to change these companies. By showing them that you can do all the things a Microsoft PC can do for less money and with much greater security and reliability, then your argument for greater effectiveness from open standards is just gravy.
This guy already has a job, and it's apparently not to decide the software on the company level. If he goes off like a lunatic and tells his bosses to change, he looks less credible and distracted. If he just gets the job done and lets them know how he did it for less, then companies might play around with MS free divisions and eventually migrate entirely.
His is the right way, yours is the wrong way. Lay off the crack cocaine, please.
What the parent is saying is that using Microsoft as the standard with which to compare everything to is simply stupid. They do not have, by far, the greatest standards in many, many areas.
Just because Windows is the dominant OS does not mean that we should therefore use it as an industry standard. Standards need to be developed for the industry as a whole, not just as Microsoft sees fit. This is partly why Microsoft has such control is because people just roll over and accept what Microsoft does as standard even if they don't like it or there is a far better way to do it.
If you continue to write to what Microsoft decides is best, why even bother with alternatives? Seriously? How does this point escape you?
Is OpenOffice not 100% compatible with Excel macros?
I ask because I remember hearing that it (or some other open source project) was 100% feature-complete, compared to Excel.
Anyway, 100% compatibility is never required, because you don't use 100% of the capabilities of Excel macroes. What you want is 100% of the features I need (be they parts of Excel macroes or otherwise), and as OpenOffice gets better, more and more people are finding that threshold has been crossed for them.
Even if you have 95% compatibility, it can be enough. Consider if you had to use a spreadsheet once a day or once a month for a few minutes that didn't quite work properly in OpenOffice. I realize many people would instantly abandon ship for MS Office at the slightest sign of trouble, but if it was just the one spreadsheet, you could probably fix it to work in OpenOffice -- or, worst case, you run one copy of Microsoft Office on a terminal server somewhere, and let everyone run Linux on the desktop for everything else.
Well, fucking DUH. I bet Windows is still far behind Ubuntu GNU/Linux when it comes to Linux compatibility, huh, Sherlock?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well, maybe it doesn't need to be compatible, but he's right: Apps are important. So if not compatible, Linux needs to have alternatives. By that I mean REAL alternatives, not stuff that you have to argue about. For many people, the apps alone mandate that a switch to Linux can't happen.
I'm like that at home. I haven't even looked at Linux for home because I know that, regardless of any other problems, it isn't usable because it doesn't support the software I want. I am not going to compromise my computing experience, it's a tool, and I'll use what makes it do what I want the best, which is Windows in this case.
Well this holds true in many cases. You can't expect someone to realistically switch to your platform if you can't offer them apps that they need. Also it needs to either be that app, or one that is just as good. You can't start demanding compromise. You can't tell a professional graphics artist that GIMP should be "good enough" and they "don't need what Photoshop has." That's lying to them and to yourself. You can't expect them to make a switch unless you are offering something that's at least as good, and probably better.
So really, it is a big problem Linux faces right now. In so many settings, it simply doesn't offer the apps that people need and thus can't be considered, regardless of other merits. One real way to solve this would be total Windows compatibility. If you could execute any Windows app under Linux, well then there's nobody who uses Windows that won't be able to get all their apps. Then the argument is purely about technical merits, cost, familiarity and so on. I'm not saying that's the only way to go or even the right one, but it is a legit thing to consider. People need certain apps. If you can't offer them those apps or something very much like them, you aren't a contender, regardless.
There are many comments on here presenting the sort arguments such as :
... that it has lost all ability to conform to international standards.
- "Open Office is not 100% compat with MSOffice"
- "My Visio docs cant be used on linux/other-non-MS-os"
- "I cant connect to our exchange servers without Windows"
- "Our company intranet requires active-x controls"
- "Yada Yada Yada, etc, etc, etc, ad-infinitum, ad-nauseum"
- "And therefore, linux is no good, and will never catch on until it does this and that, and anything else that Windows makes possible"
None of these arguments demonstrate anything lacking with Linux. The ALL demonstrate how very badly your organisation's IT policies and strategies has backed itself into a corner and locked itself so deeply into a closed and proprietary architecture
If Linux has a hard time co-existing in your current infrastructure, then that should be a huge red flag that there is something seriously wrong with the way you are operating, and the strategic decisions that have been made in the past. If your organisation doesnt have the agility to adapt to what is happening now in the wider world - then its only a matter of time before that lack of agility is going to hit you hard like a speeding train.
Thats all well and good if you are happy to thrive in isolation, like some extended family of inbred hillbillys far from civilisation, but in the meantime, the rest of the world will be passing you by. If thats where you want to be in 10-20 years time, then stick to what you are doing now, and ignore the obvious. Blame it all on linux if that makes you happy.
Thin clients are a massive and undesirable infrastructure change. Parallels is different from running a VM because all the handoffs are transparent. You put in a Windows CD or launch an .exe file, and it takes care of it more or less like Windows. A VM in the background only works for completely managed environments set up by the IT staff, and even still represents an unnecessary amount of network traffic and overhead for what should be done locally. Installing and managing local VMs gets right back to the problem of being adequate but completely undesired.
"It can be done" isn't good enough. It has to be well-executed and seamless.
That's all very nice, but in some fields Microsoft *is* the industry standard. You bitch about it all day, but Microsoft Office is the standard, and until that changes compatibility will be crucial.
For example, at my job (web programming) I'm required to record the times I spend on each client, so my manager can invoice the client. My manager uses MS Excel, and therefore I must use a document format that he can open, even though I'm not running windows on my mac workstation. Similarly, my css and javascript must be compatible with IE 6, and my server-side code mustn't trigger any security warning dialogs under IE 7.
The end result is, wether I like it or not, I must use an Excel compatible format (and I've found Excel to work the best), and I must run a virtual machine to properly test websites in both versions of IE. Excel is a memory hog and has terrible workflow, and IE is absolutely the worst browser to use as a standard.
But microsoft *is* the standard, and many many people have no choice but to follow that standard.
TBH, as soon as anyone says "$PRODUCT is not as Windows compatible as Windows", you can probably stop listening.
Windows is a proprietary software product. Much of what goes on under the hood is completely unknown - enough information has been reverse engineered for some interoperability (cf. Samba, ndiswrapper), but expecting any product to ever be as "Windows compatible as Windows" is asking for the moon.
"Paris Hilton looks more like Paris Hilton than any Paris-Hilton look-alike". Still, misses the point: Is Paris Hilton worth looking like, or emulating in any way?
This "bias" thing is quite silly to start with. I started using Linux back in the WfW days because back then I had grown quite fed up with the instability of the document preparation programs I was using (Word 2.Oc notably which had a useable lifespan of about 6 to 8 minutes before it crashed depite my being on a first name basis with numerous people of the local Microsoft crew). Since then I've become quite comfortable with my setup (I did know Unix before through SunOS and (urk) SCO). Recently I got an iBook since it was one of the cheapest "decent" laptops.
However I don't like it. It just doesn't work for me. So it's hopefully going to make someone happy through eBay while I get a Dell and stick Linux on it.
As for Windows, I still use it for games but never really get to see much of it (just the start menu and the games sub menu) and I find its interface rather confusing. My copy is licensed bought directly on-line from microsoft. I wouldn't use it for working though because like MacOS I probably would have to fight it to do what I want. Besides I have no idea what software is available (apart for the few games I follow) and I couldn't care less.
All this talk of bias is mostly people finding something comfortable and finally finding an environment that works with them instead of against them. For me it was a customisable X11 desktop (KDE currently) with all the nifty Unixy tools, for others it may be MacOS or even Windows. The lucky ones get to gravitate towards the environment that works for them. The others are stuck with whatever was forced upon them in the beginning.
The ones that fight their machine every step of the way are the ones that show no bias.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Well, we could list any other number of application areas where the OSS alternatives are far, far behind the commercial alternatives. In CAD, in Multimedia authoring and manipulation, in Finanacial Tools. These are all real applications that many people find important. And the OSS alternatives rank poorly in many regards.
Now, I use gEDA for a lot of things at home, and even if it were $50 per seat instead of free, it would be 200-500 times cheaper than the commercial alternatives. However, time is money when you're doing 'real world' engineering design work. Sometimes it pays off to delegate the software development to professionals who have been working on coding and actual honest-to-goodness Human Factors design, rather than whomever volunteers for a community driven project.
Let me jump in and add something to that: three years ago, I went through the entire process of setting up a 80 desktop environment using Linux. I set up an LDAP server, Samba, home folders on a centralized share, print servers using CUPS, mail server using Dovecot/EXIM, a centralized configuration system and a minimal level of failover redunancy... in short: the works. The system worked nice and stable, but it took me 2 months to get everything up and running (granted, at the time, I was new to LDAP and it took some time to set up the master/slave replication, integrate PAM & Samba into it and write my own scripts to keep Linux and Windows passwords synchronized). A year later, I configured a similar set-up using Windows Active Directory (which in the end is just a pimped LDAP server). This takes a day to setup a similar environment. Of course, you do not have the same granularity of configuration options, but it works quite nicely out of the box. This led me to the impression that even though Linux is very nice, stable, configurable and using all the OSS servers, it was in fact Microsoft who took these open technologies and turned them into an all-integrated environment. Note: I am aware of the similar attempts like SuSe Enterprise and several Ubuntu-based distributions that provide similar out of the box functionality. However, that was 2006/2007, Microsoft did that trick in 2000 and is currently 8 year ahead in development.
Actually, I doubt the original poster is in a managed corporate environment or that they have admin folks of any quality since they didn't notice. In a corporate (not a small office setup), real admins monitor the network and clients for changes like this. Hell, I know when someone installs software much less changes the OS. I keep a master list of installed software and I frequently verify that it's all up to date. In a larger security-conscious environment you absolutely must be aware of whats running on your network and what your vulnerabilities are. Rogue users installing Linux without even talking to the admin guys as a security risk, period. Most Linux guys are woefully ignorant of how nice a well establish AD environment is. It's more that just domain services. It's the ability to assign privileges at a very granular level, set domain wide policies, domain wide scripts for anything unusual, etc. I manage both Linux and Windows networks (>400 each). The Windows side is far easier to manage than the Linux side. On the linux side, I'm constantly fighting stupid stuff like file permissions. amba sucks at letting users change file permissions and user-group-world isn't exactly granular enough. Despite the Open Office lovers here, it's a piss-poor replacement for MS Office. It can't handle any of the VBA scripting that is ever so present in Excel. Most word documents look different between the two. Forget even trying to use MS Access or MS Project files.
TweakUI FTW! Failing that, a registry edit. That being said, I find the *nix commands to be less cryptic than digging through the registry, and I myself only recently made the switch to Linux. In fact, there is only one reason I even keep Windows around (A game, surprise surprise). Well, that and I can't seem to get the network printer working in Linux. I'll have to look into that one.