Originally Posted by
slim_slag
And you agree that open office is not a good solution.
I said nothing of the sort. OpenOffice is an excellent solution, I dropped Office 2003 for OOo six months ago and have yet to find an old MS document that I can't open.
"..non intuitive when you are used to windows.."
Precisely. It isn't a Windows clone. Windows only seems intuitive because you know it so well. A lot of things in Windows are actually not at all intuitive to real newbies. Linux/KDE does many things a little differently (so does a Mac/Tiger). But once you get used to it, it's easy.
Once upon a time people used many different word processing programs (Lotus Word Pro, WordPerfect, Nota Bene, Wordstar) and were quite used to the idea that different apps behaved somewhat differently. Same for spreadsheets and presentation packages [1]. It's only since Microsoft bought out or squashed any commercial opposition that a choiceless monoculture developed and people started thinking that the Microsoft way was the only way to do things. This hasn't actually been good for any of us, even Microsoft. Now, for the first time in a long time, MS has some genuine competition, which is good - MS is having to get off it's fat ass and try to make some real improvements.
[1] The bugbear of course was document interchange, but if ODF had then been an ISO standard (as it is now), that difficulty wouldn't have existed.
I like the freedoms that Linux gives me, but I'm far from a fanatic. I'm well aware of the residual deficiencies in the UI (and participate in usability testing and discussion to improve it). Personally I'm wary of the FSF's planned move to GPL3 and the FSF generally - I think they're far too doctrinaire for their own good (which makes me a GNU apostate!).
Linux isn't perfect, but it has made stunning strides in the last 3 years. Already it is far more stable and secure than Windows, within another year or so the usability will be better as well.
PS: My only experience of setting up RAID is on FreeBSD (where it isn't difficult), so I can't comment on about it on either GNU/Linux or MS Windows. Few home/ordinary users even know what a RAID array is, let alone need one.
PPS: With regard to the link "If this suite's a success, why is it so buggy?" that slim posted, it's worth noting that the article dates from 2005 and likely was about OOo 2.0 beta - we're now at OOo 2.1 stable, so it's hardly germane. Nevertheless, the author did admit, "But, for what it's worth, I still think OpenOffice may be better for books than Microsoft Word."