Hello Chris, I'm sorry for your disappointment and frustration with SuSE8.1 Linux distro. However, in our eng. dept. which runs solely on Linux SuSE 7.1/7.3/8.0/8.1 situation is right opposite to yours. Our engineers were very frustrated with WinNT as a desktop OS due to its constant crashes, especially during critical data analysis operations. About two years ago we started an experiment within our engineering group to run WinNT via Vmware on the top of the Linux boxes. The more my colleagues were getting familiar with Linux the less
Alex Daniloff wrote: they were
firing up Vmware with Winblows. Finally all installations of WinNT and Vmware were wiped off from our hard drives.
Thanks for your input, Alex. And thanks for not flaming me. I was a bit frustrated this afternoon. Things are a bit better now. You know, I really am amazed by your experience. I work at Sandia, a big US nuclear laboratory. 90% of desktops are Windows, NT until about a year ago, and now 2000. The other 8% are Macs, and about 2% SGI and Linux. I often try to advocate Linux to folks, on both philosophical and technical grounds. Unfortunately, I don't know what I will say if anybody tries to install Linux, and has a lot of problems. I may have to eat my shoe. But I usually don't hide the fact that it can take more effort to tweak Linux into shape than Windows. But what I find interesting and disturbing, is that out Windows machines at work don't crash. I work with scientists. And they never say their machines crash. They are doing constant scientific data analysis, and technical document preparation. I should ask more of them if their machines crash. But so far, I have been very disappointed to find, of the three guys that I talk to regularly about this, that they say their machines run for weeks without crashing. This disappoints me because I can't honestly argue to them that Linux is more stable. In fact, with the instability of the flagship Konqueror, that they would most certainly encounter if they tried a modern Linux, while clearly it is not representative of the stability of the underlying Linux, they would likely get a bad taste about that. Also, peculiar hardware problems can lock a Linux box, not really the fault of Linux, but this would be perceived as such by Windows users. I am very happy to hear of your success getting engineers working on Linux. I often bug vendors of the softare tools for electrical engineering, my field, to port to Linux. I think in the next few years, some important software releases will appear for Linux. At least I hope.
I admit that the office programs in Linux still immature and KDE still didn't reach its pick of usability yet. Why don't you go back to basic if you're so unhappy with all these GUI applications? Use 'mc' Midnight Commander as your file/ftp browser instead of Konqueror. You can use Windowmaker instead of resource consuming KDE.
Well, I really like KDE, and the new KDE is really beautiful. I never liked mc. But really, I use a hybrid approach. I am not hooked on GUI. I use the command line quite a bit. But there are times when it seems easiest to use Konqueror, and other times it is most straightforward to use the prompt. This certainly is a plus about Linux, there are many ways to skin the cat, sometimes too many ways.
You can prepare the content of documents you need in plain text files using vi or other simple editor. When you need, you can produce your final documents in pretty much all desirable formats using LaTeX. If you need to plot your data use GNUPlot or Perl.GD and other graphical modules. This is actually how most of scientific and research publications done.
Well, OpenOffice/StarOffice are great for general purpose stuff, once they are tweaked so the fonts look right. But they aren't good for complex technical docs. I resisted learning Latex for quite some time. But now I am going to learn it. I am starting with Lyx. I prefer the ease of just copy/pasting a graphic from one module of the office package to the wordprocessor, but OO/SO are just a bit too buggy for a complex doc, and their equation editors look like chickenscratch compared to Latex. I'll tell you, it was just last week that I finally wrote my first equations with Lyx (Latex, effectively) and they were so lovely I was practically drooling over them. So I'm sold on Latex/Lyx. Ok, good day! -- _____________________ Christopher R. Carlen crobc@earthlink.net Suse 7.3 Linux 2.4.10