On Monday 14 November 2005 07:16 am, Kevin Donnelly wrote:
On Monday 14 November 2005 03:21, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
Don't try to get the average secratary to try Linux. It's not ready for that kind of use.
Steven, I do wish you'd stop flogging this horse, which died several weeks ago.
I don't agree with you. For one thing the thread has taken many turns.
And the above in particular is just bunkum. I actually know of one "average secretary" who is doing just that, and my wife (who can't even remember where she's saved files) gets along perfectly well.
Yes, perhaps she can use it, but what happens when she needs to prepare or use an Excel spreadsheet? Can she do that just as easily with OO, KSpread or Gnumeric? Are OO documents really MS Word compatable? I ran into that kind of problem when preparing my resume. I wrote my resume in XML and CSS, no flippin' html for me. But some employers insisted that it be delivered in MS Word. When I looked at the MS Word rendering of the resume produced by OO, (this was a while back) it really didn't look good.
Can all this Novell FUD be taken off-list, please? If you don't like SUSE, or fear what it might become, just stop using it.
It's not that simple. I 've been using SuSE Linux for a little less than 7 years. There is no question of whether I like the product. SuSE is far more usable now that the KDE has been developed. I recall the first time I used the KDE, there were no RPMs for it. It was in alpha. The only way to get it was to check it out from CVS, and compile it. IIRC, it would almost fit on a floppy. There's more to usability in the workplace than simply whether a person can figure out how to use a tool. I suspect most applications such as KMail, KNode, KWord, etc. are as easy, or easier to use than their MS counterparts. My purpose is not to badmouth Linux. I just don't want people to think they can simply switchout the entrenched monopolistic desktop on everybody's desk and things are going to workout just fine. That would only lead to horror stories of companies making the wrong IT moves, and give Linux bad press.