A lot of ppl complain that Linux lacks software. This might be true for the big commercial stuff like CAD and (to a lessening degree) even Office, but it is definitely not true for all the small tools you need in your everyday computer life.
Agreed. Still, I have a "Linux (allegedly) lacks software" question, about "videoconferencing". The institution where I work issues to its workers laptops equipped with 'Doze, webcams, and recent, commercial versions of CUseeme. (You may remember that CU stands for Cornell University and that this was once freeware; the commercial developers have recently been fiddling with its name, calling it "Meeting Point", "Click to Meet", etc.) Nobody actually uses CUseeme (yet) because nobody else uses it (yet). Me, I don't use it as I turned down the offer of laptop/webcam/CUseeme, don't much want to squint at little pictures of other people talking, and don't want other people looking at me; however, I am slightly responsible for knowing what's going on -- and I'm lost. I get the impression that in the Windows and Mac worlds, "videoconferencing software" has been eclipsed by freebies such as Yahoo/M$ Messenger, and that these programs are mutually incompatible. As for Linux, I found old references to a CUseeme-compatible program called Qseeme, and after a long search even located and downloaded a copy. But it no longer seems to be under development. I may be less competent at websearches than I realize, but anyway my searches for info come up with nothing more helpful than porno sites and extraordinarily uninformative sites waffling opaquely about "corporate solutions". Can anyone give me an URL or two about non-proprietary videoconferencing, or does such a beast just not exist? Irrelevantly to the above, a token M$ quibble:
After a clean M$-Installation, you need to start looking for all the tools and install them separately.
But if it isn't your first M$ installation and you have a clue, you'll have done something like burnt ZIP files of the good stuff (and some configuration files) onto a CD-R, and will be able to install from there. Not a piece of cake, but not that agonizing either.