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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.'"
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
For many technically minded people, Linux does what they want and windows doesnt.
Remember, the more skilled you are at programming, the more linux will suit you because you can modify it to suit your needs. Similarly, the entire working environment is far more easily customised.
So you see, most linux advocates are technically minded people, who use linux for the above reasons, which fulfills the same basic requirements that you have.
Oh, and OSX is nice too but if the frontend doesnt suit you (and it cant possibly, one size never fits all) then your screwed unless you replace aqua with X11, and then you may as well be running linux.
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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'.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
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.
But Linux is on everyone's radar scope (it's unusual not to hear it's deployment discussed in IT meetings), and the small holes in the dams are beginning to outnumber Ballmer's fingers.
Tension Mounts As Eleventh Hole Is Plugged
Please stop stalking me, bro.
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.