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.'"

Comments

Applications are more important than the OS

[dybdahl]

Most office workers use more apps than e-mail and websurfing, and if 100% compatibility with Excel macros is required, you're going to run Microsoft Excel, no matter what. The same principle can be applied to most other apps in an office.

Ubuntu is still far behind Microsoft Windows, when it comes to Windows compatibility.

Re:Applications are more important than the OS

[at_slashdot]

"You can't tell a professional graphics artist that GIMP should be "good enough" and they "don't need what Photoshop"

I don't know for others, but myself I'm getting tired to hear about Photoshop everytime switching from Windows to Linux is mentioned. Does anybody know what is the market penetration of Photoshop? 50%? 20%? 3%? of Windows users? Thanks!

Me too

[PinkyDead]

I work for a large company who seem to be of the mindset that if big companies don't support each other that the world will end. Ergo, Microsoft good, anything else bad. I know that in certain geographical (unnamed) divisions the use of Firefox is a sackable offence - or certainly warrants a massive slap on the wrists.

Where I am it's not so bad - however, my (illegal) Xubuntu installation is on an external drive with the Grub RW CD for booting and I can pull the plug (literally) if there's a problem. Originally, I had a linux paritition but I've moved away from that and restored all my partitions to the way they were delivered. Although I use rsync to keep copies of my home directory on the D: drive just in case and I have dallied with the Linux swap on the Windows swap file (still working out the kinks). Xubuntu on an external drive is slow - but it's actually faster than Windows on the main drive.

Anyways, I would have two complaints from the point of view of someone sneaking Linux into the Workplace (Undermining the bastards from the inside!):

1. OpenOffice sucks. Now the response to this is the obvious 'Hey Stupid! OpenOffice isn't Linux'. To which I reply, 'Hey Nutjob! Wake up to the realities of the market you are trying to get in to'. It matters not that OpenOffice is not officially a part of Linux - it is a fundamental part of Linux in a business environment. OpenOffice is not able to handle the full array of rubbish that Microsoft Word produces leading to the inevitable - 'Oh that's strange I looks fine on my computer' {scramble to reissue document using Word in Wine} 'Try that version'. That said Word 97 works great under Wine, so I use that a lot - although I do prefer AbiWord.

2. It'd be nice to have a stealth Windows skin for Xubuntu. Needs to have all those nasty startup screens, skin the GDM, skin the window manager - and the big one, skin Xscreensaver especially so it can load 'corporate mandated screensavers' and ask for the password in a Windowsy way. Oh and some yoke that could be installed so that anyone enquiring from the outside using network tools etc (i.e. M$ Administrator), would be told 'Windows Machine - nothing to see here'.