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.

:ok:

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."

I switched to Linux about 2 years ago, there was a little pain in the transition, but I persevered, and you never stop learning. I'm just a home user, (a sort of sub-geek - the same type as finds this forum interesting) but now I have a set up that is easily the equal of XP for user-friendliness and functionality. If you are not fussed about playing games on your PC then I'd go for it, if only for the challenge.

Just to clarify: my "problems" with Linux were at the last stage of the initial installation and setup. I have several machines networked, and the old PC that runs Linux has three hard drives, with Windows and several flavours of Linux on it. It also has a DVDROM and a CDRW. The DVDROM is SCSI.

Some Linuxes had no problem with the network, and some had no problem with the multiple hard drives or the SCSI. None of them got it all right straight off, and I had to edit smb.conf or fstab or both. Once that was done, then Linux ran flawlessly and far faster than Windows.

I also tried running a MIDI editor and player - that was trickier, but isn't something most Linux users would want to do.

I would recommend Linux to anyone - but with the proviso that you may need a little techie help to get it working.

Open Office has managed fine with every MS Office file I've thrown at it - with the exception of MS Publisher stuff. But then, different versions of MS Publisher have the same problems.

Fair enough Mac.

PS your solution didn't work :{

Hi slim_

Sorry 'bout that!

Lets go to the first site I get when I put "samba add user" into Google - http://www.samba.netfirms.com/addusers.htm - although it's at the command line they do step you through it with illustrations.

The index page for that site - http://www.samba.netfirms.com/index.htm - has a very easy and lucid guide to SMB networking between Linux and Windows generally.

Allbest

Mac :ok:

C:\Geek!
-bash-2.05b$Luser!
C:\Nerd!
-bash-2.05b$Fanboi!

I love OS wars. :)

IIRC, this thread started off by asking what sort of Lunix to use. It follows that we are not going to need to discuss Windows except in by way of comparison.

Longarm - whichever distro you take (Mepis is the best of the lot, Kubuntu a close second), painstakingly document all your userid/password combinations (e.g. for Pprune), backup, backup, backup, and migrate your emails, contacts and anything else you might need to somewhere you can get them from Linux, be it a FAT32 partition, DVD, etcetera.

Find out how to shrink your (presumably) Windows partition, (an excellent tutorial is here: http://phoenix.calpoly.edu/~kvoelker.../dual-boot.cgi ), create a couple more for Linux, download, and install. Before the grin goes off your face, log in to everywhere you need to (using the userid/password combos mentioned earlier). Allow a week to get over the urges to boot into Windows and a lifetime to learn the intricacies of this splendid OS.

Oh, and backup.

You are then be set up to join the geeks, squeezing zits and doing sudoku on the Tube.

BOFH
//IEFBR14