Hi: On Tuesday 27 March 2001 18:00, you wrote:
I am a huge fan of Linux, I have been a Unix Admin for 8 years now and have been using Linux since like kernel 0.97 when you had to compile your own from the jump, however, Linux is not an ideal replacement for the Windows desktop. While most developers and other technical staff can intuitively function on a Linux box with a relatively short learning curve, the other half of the company cannot. You have obviously never seen the cost of training and the costs of administrative overhead. If you were to place a Linux desktop in a non-technical department, say HR for example, the learning curve/lack of productivity alone would outweight the cost of Microsoft.
However steep the learning curve may be with Linux it is certainly a better desktop OS than M$ and therefor worth adopting. I have to use M$ at my work, at the FDA, and Kword , Kspread and Killustrator are, even in their newly minted form, much better than M$ Office 97. First off Excel does not round numbers properly and requires the use of =ROUND(*, 4) everywhere. Kspread does not suffer from this defect. Secondly Kspread embeddings do not dissappear or "Opaque" in Kword as they do in M$ Office. M$ has a nasty habit of locking up after you have saved a large and complex document many times. This prevents it from being saved. This has not happened with Kword yet. The scrolling and cut and paste features in M$ word are really erratic. Excel embedments in Word leave grid line artifacts at times that cannot be gotten rid of. M$ runs slow and is ponderous. It also does not come with Scilab, Octave or compilers. M$ has nothing like Xfig or Killustrator. True it has M$ Paint but AFAIK it cannot draw reqular polygons and so is worthless for rendering cyclical compounds. Finally it crashes too much. When M$ goes down it wipes out a major portion of my lab report. Let me tell you it is no joke to have to retype all that stuff. IMHO M$ survived because there was no competition. Basically Apple committed suicide after it hired a PepsiCola salesman to be their CEO. Now that KDE 2 is here Mr. Gates and company are as a helpless as a sheep before Tyrannosaurs Rex. Just my $0.02. -- Cheers, Jonathan