-----Original Message----- From: Kevin Donnelly [mailto:kevin@dotmon.com] Sent: Friday, November 15, 2002 7:58 AM
Just accept the PC, with Windows whatever on it, and then take your discs in from home and install SuSE on another partition. This means that you can continue using Windows while you iron out any problems. Once you have everything running the way you want, then start using Linux day-to-day. If you can do all your work with it, then that is the best advertisement for it, and I suspect you will then get queries from others at work who want to "try" it.
That's basically what I tried to do here, with the difference that our IT dept is actually in favor of moving to Linux. But, *their* trial-and-terror has all been with Red Hat, so far. I installed SuSE, and had some limited success for a while, but in more than a year (I started with 7.3 on my laptop) I have not been able to do a full day's work, nor to deliver a project using just Linux. (A "project" for me is a document or a set of docs. I'm not a programmer.) Also, I've always had more-problems/less-success with SuSE than others at my company have had with Red Hat. They just install, answer a few config questions, and it all seems to work. The problems they have been having are more of the capability variety, rather than configuration. That is, the OS, the desktop, and ordinary office stuff just works. The problems have been to get solutions for "groupware" stuff and for special needs. I've just had to switch back to Outlook for my e-mail, because the sudden-and-totally-arbitrary failure of KMail (after a year of no trouble) has been taking way too much of my time to try to fix. Of course, that means that my past year of mail is unavailable in Outlook, and if I ever switch back to Linux, there'll be several thousand orphan messages left behind in Outlook. Yes, those are solvable problems, and some day, I'll probably solve them. The biggest problem is with this "stealth" crap. I've learned to do my job *very* efficiently in Windows, because I spend so damn much of my time fruitlessly poking at broken Linux stuff, and then panicking and jumping back to Windows just in time to squeak each deadline (usually by staying up all night). I thought I would be able to drag things along, one incremental step at a time, so that I could do more and more in Linux, just going back to Windows for the parts that still weren't working. I was unprepared for things just arbitrarily breaking in Linux, so that it's more like two steps forward and three steps back. Reminds me of Windows 3.x. The only thing I've got on my office laptop that didn't come from SuSE 8.0 or YOU is OpenOffice 1.0.1. I've been trying to work around OOo's lack of capability (compared to FrameMaker), but I keep getting distracted by other stuff that -- I think -- should "just work", but which sucks so much of my time because it doesn't "just work". I am, indeed, one of those people that Ben and Anders describe as a person who mostly just wants to use the computer to get my real work done. I do have some interest in what makes it tick, but I'm not a real hobbyist. When I come home from work, if I'm looking forward to doing something on the computer, then I'm looking forward to browsing something, writing something, or even playing a little game (well, maybe someday when 3D works...). Definitely, if I'm looking foreward to doing something on the computer at night, it's *not* the opportunity to spend another night trying to figure out why something basic is refusing to work, and combing 100 million web sites for tiny, contradictory pieces of the (usually) wrong answers. Yes, I know that many/most of you guys just live for the excitement of something breaking so you can figure out how to fix it. Because you all hang out together with people like yourselves, you probably think that people like me are the minority. It's the other way around. Meanwhile, at work, I hope nobody ever audits my timesheets and figures out how much "project" time is actually just futzing with Linux stuff trying to make ordinary office apps work the way they are supposed to work. /kevin