Now VERY *OT* (hit delete now): RE: networking newbie

From: Aaron Christopher Finney <A_Finney_at_wfi-inc.com>
Date: Wed Dec 2 00:38:07 1998

On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Sam Ismail wrote:

> On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Allison J Parent wrote:
>
> > The management is not married to DOS/WIN/NT as a "they are great" but
> > rather it does the job for the scale of business they are and within
> > costs. The user base however could never work with linux(unix).
>
> How wrong you are, Allison. How wrong you are.
>
> My friend is running Linux on his home PC, but if you didn't know any
> better (and if you didn't look close enough) you'd swear he was running
> Windows 95. The fact is that his desktop might as well BE Win95, because
> it is stolen from the look & feel of Win95. Its called the Star Office
> Suite. Find yourself a copy and install it on your Linux box. You'll
> never boot Win95 again. You'll never need to.

I have used both Star Office and Applix (my choice). It is *not* Win95,
no matter how much it looks like it. Users who rely on Microsoft Word and
Excel daily are usually deeply entangled in the proprietary macros and
keyboard shortcuts of them. Much of the software we use is loosely written
in VB, using third-party imaging and encryption toolkits. Our existing
data system is written in Omnis7, not portable. Our staff relys on
Physician yellow-pages CD's that only run on windows. Our field personell
use laptops and Fujitsu 600c scanners to copy medical records, whose
drivers are only released for Windows.

Linux will *not* replace Windows on the desktop in most businesses. What
Linux/FreeBSD/OSS-type systems *will* replace is the PC-based NT servers.

Anyone who has to administrate a large network/support users for a living
would not try to switch everyone to Linux and accept the responsibility
for teaching them how to use it, no matter how P.C. it becomes.

My $0.02...

Aaron C. Finney Systems Administrator WFI Incorporated
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"UNIX is an exponential algorithm with a seductively small constant."
Received on Wed Dec 02 1998 - 00:38:07 GMT