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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (78234)	11/2/1999 10:15:00 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 1583560

Carl, I am a member of the Toronto linux users group(TLUG) and have been active in a number of installfests and I agree linux has a bright future.....but not a viable consumer present. It has a viable office presence when properly setup and installed with some on site IS presence. It is true that it can be setup quickly, by one who has set up a few before or has some DOS/Windows experience. It is not ready for an appliance operator. Linux is expanding very rapidly from a smaller base so the ratios look good. The recent moves by MSFT to go for annual upgrade fees and large per seat fees for assorted Office upgrades will help Linux...in time. If you have word perfect on a box for a legal secretary who is used to WP it can be fine. I can see Linux being a capable system in about 2 years. There is indeed a shortage of programs....more are coming, as well as easier RPM type autoinstalls and by then almost all accessories will be Linux probeable and will autosetup. Bill

To: Bilow who wrote (78234)	11/2/1999 9:17:00 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583560

Re: average Linux user requires "cryptic commends" Hi Carl, Got to agree with you on your Linux comments. Window's little secret is that it is harder to install than Linux. Everyone thinks windows is easy to install because their machine came with windows already on it - boy, was that easy! But having regularly reconfigured machines while testing versions of Caldera and Red Hat linux, as well as Win 95/98 and NT/WTS, I can say from direct experience that Linux is now easier to install than Windows. I think this may be intentional on Microsoft's part. They would just as soon make it tough for anyone but an OEM to configure an installation, since that's their best bet to guarantee that nobody is "borrowing" licenses. I've used WordPerfect and StarOffice on linux and found both to be as easy to use a typical windows app. WordPerfect, in particular, is everything you'd expect from a state of the art word processor. I'm not as happy with the IDE's out there yet (at least the one's I've seen), and I haven't seen a good xbase/access solution yet (though I have to admit, I haven't been focused in this area for several months, and the rate at which linux progresses is astounding - so this may have changed). But for a typical user doing word processing, spreadsheets, and email, I think Linux on the desktop is here now. On the flip side, Microsoft has made great progress in improving the stability of Windows this year. The two systems are becoming quite competitive in almost all aspects. Regards, Dan