Seems to me that when the only people who have a chance at solving The Biggest Problem meet, we shouldn’t shut them down.

I’ve been using OpenOffice for about five years, and it just keeps getting better. Of all the people I’ve switched to OO, I never heard of any of them paying for a copy of MS Office again.

I also rely on Firefox and Thunderbird.

Re: XP: MS is going to provide critical updates until 2014 and the upcoming Windows 7 is going to be able to run XP under VM. In other words, XP could easily outlive civilization as we know it. HAHA

Will people upgrade their XP boxes to Windows 7 to then run XP as a VM? I sure as hell won’t, but a lot of organizations will. This way, all of their crappy in house junk won’t be bricked by the new OS. Having that 100% XP compatible mode might convince corporations to adopt it, instead of banning it from their organizations at all cost, like they did with Vista. What could be so compelling about Windows 7, besides the fact it will be able to run XP??? I can’t imagine what. (Being able to run DirectX 10 games?) I’m just glad that this nonsense isn’t my problem anymore! ha

The “death-by-papercuts” descripton of the linux desktop experience is pretty accurate. It’s like the joke about cars where if you don’t want to be a mechanic, don’t buy an X (where X is whatever brand/model you consider unreliable). if you want to use an OS and not be confronted with the workings of the internals regularly, don’t go for linux. Most of the graphical tools only manage to obfuscate how what is going on under the hood really operates, which, when they fail to work perfectly – which is often – leaves you scrambling to figure out how to fix stuff.

Having said all that….I’m still ok with the linux ‘desktop’ because I don’t use much besides command-line tools and a web browser. Yes, my brain is stuck in the Jurassic. Fvwm2 FTW. And yeah, I love the availability of the pool of free software – even if it’s not perfect. And yes, I like software where the source is available and documented. But I’m not going to delude myself that the desktop experience is what most people want.

I think OpenOffice is more than adequate, Thunderbird and Firefox are adequate, the package installation system works fine.

They do have quite aways to go, but think back to much it sucked back in 2003. I installed Mandrake and it destroyed one of my disc drives. I then tried SuSe. It sucked. I waited a few years and tried Suse or OpenSuse; I was pleased to find it had vastly improved on the previous incarnation. However, it still sucked at a number of things; it wouldn’t autodetect devices plugged into it, it wouldn’t interact with the wireless chip, etc.

The latest incarnation of Ubuntu/Kubuntu solves a lot of these problems.

Now, contrast this consistent progress with the consistent decline of Microsoft. You pay more, you get less, and you keep giving up control, incrementally, you’re feeding a proprietary system that fuels greedy billionaires. They keep selling you the same versions of the same programs with features that you don’t want, every few years, whether you like it or not.

Of course, we’ve heard it all before. I think if Linux keeps making the progress it has been making at the rate it has been making, it will surpass Windows.

What are XP users going to do when Microsoft stops supporting XP, and then killer XP viruses and trojans start appearing?

I suppose they’ll do what all the businesses who still run Windows 95, 98, 2000 do; hire IT to people to occasionally patch problems and run the system until it becomes unprofitable.

I think Microsoft made Windows 2K/XP good enough that most people would never voluntarily “upgrade” unless forced to. I could see Bill Gates one day going “Fuck it!” and hitting the red switch the uploads the update that crashes all the XP machines for good.

Server side, linux is the way to go. Client side, no, not for me. I use trading software that’s Windows only. I also require Photoshop. Gimp sucks and the Photoshop-works-pretty-well-on-Wine lie is as old as the hills. Been there done that. Video editing on linux is a joke…

In my opinion, all of it sucks. Windows, Mac OS and Windows. But XP gets in my way the least. It’s very fast. It never crashes. But, yes, the B Gates special sauce is a worry.

I have a buddy who’s got three propellers in his beanie cap. He’s a software engineer and linux admin for a large corporation. HE DOESN’T USE LINUX ON THE CLIENT SIDE! He uses a Mac because he’s fed up with the death-by-papercuts experience of getting (non server related) things done on Linux.

It’s a matter of pick your poison, I guess.

: )

Ever wonder if open source is a proprietary plot to obtain free R & D; i.e. IE7 copied a bunch of Firefox features. However, it’s still a piece of garbage.

I definitely recommend Ubuntu / Kubuntu. It’s still not completely idiot-proof, but nothing is. It has improved leaps and bounds since previous incarnations. You can do pretty much most of what you can do with Windows XP, and you can run Windows XP programs in virtualization tool called Wine.

You also have access to much free software that does most of what people need to do.

But you guys probably already know this.

There are hundreds of Linux distributions. In fact, if you are a hardcore nerd, you can take one, and then develop it towards your own ends.

(rolls eyes)

* sigh *

(I use XP too, by the way.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P.

Makes me wonder about how reliable the information is.