I know, this is off-topic. Eh. It happens once in a while... Niclas wrote regarding 'Re: [SLE] Networking question' on Mon, Aug 23 at 09:56:
Indeed so.
To me, Linux is the most cost-effective network service server OS. I would never consider using M$ for this. I will gladly consider changing on my desktop as well when:
1. there is a decent office suite available,
www.openoffice.org (unless your definition of "decent" is "looks and works and has a non-intuitive interface and opens files just like MS Office"). It works very well. The only problems I'm aware of is that ti sometimes doesn't open MS documents perfectly. MS Office doesn't open other suite's documents properly sometimes, too.
2. my computer games work on Linux,
Buy a playstation. The games are better, they look better than most any computer game, and you could potentially run linux on it. You should be able to get one for less than the cost of a new video card.
3. the KDE browser becomes fast enough,
Nothing's ever "fast enough". Ever. My daily driver makes over 400HP, and can exceed the speed limit by over 3x, but it's nowhere close to "fast enough". That doesn't mean I'll stop driving it until it's faster...
4. there is a good anti-virus and internet security suite for Linux, (Yes, this will become a problem once Linux is used by more than the enthusiasts.)
Don't log in as root, don't run untrusted binaries, and make backups every once in a while. That has worked for me on windows since 1993, and it's worked for me on Linux since 1995. I've never used antivirus software, and I've never had a virus. As someone who uses a *lot* of computers (yup, I'm a sysadmin), I can safely say that education and software updates work way better than relying on some antivirus program. As a linux zealot, I'm also inclined to point out that the common virus problems under windows aren't so much due to Windows' popularity, but due to the horrible decisions made when designing some of them. Good heavens, Outlook Express was vulnurable to a problem in the way it parsed date headers! What idiot decided that they needed to rewrite date parsing *and* managed to get it wrong? How hard is it to allocate enough space for a date string, and then not go over that space limitation? :)
Having this, I would only have to boot into W2k a few times a year for my annual accounting. Man, do I long for that day!
I do my taxes online, using a web browser on my linux box. The day is now, so it seems. --Danny