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From: "Frank Brand" <fbrand at uq.net.au>
To: <general at humbug.org.au>
Subject: [H-GEN] Linux Workstation - Windows replacement
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 10:04:53 +1000
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[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and  ]
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For those of you who might not read Slashdot in some detail, I include the
following response regarding larger Linux installations.

To me, this is significanf for at least 2 reasons:-

1. The guy is working in a *NIX organisation and is not a Microsoft
apologist, he seems to have some degree of decent knowledge about different
OS's.

2. I am about to make up a demo Linux box (an AMD 400/ 20 Gb HDD/256 Mb RAM)
to put into a MS based organisation so they can see how Linux might work. I
will use Mandrake 8.1 and try GNOME/KDE and various office solutions. A
major sticking point (as I have indicated in previous posts and this guy
makes the same point too) is the browser. For E-commerce and accounting work
etc. the browsers available for Linux are unsuitable. I have not tried
Mozilla 0.94 but I will give that a shot and see if it can perform better.


Constructive comments regarding alternatives would be welcomed - eg re most
suitable distro, office software, browsers etc. The company involved is a
hard nut to crack, they couldn't give a shit what they use but it has to
measure up in usability with the MS systems they use now - by usability I
mean ease of doing things, speed of response. No use saying but Linux offers
security advantages blah, blah...these are not servers but simply
workstations that hardly ever fall over with blue screens, they contain no
sensitive data (this is held on the servers) and if there is a problem they
can reinstall everything in an hour (but this has never happened).



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I work for a small firm that offers UNIX (including Linux) based software to
integrate the newer UNIX servers with old mainframe applications (like CICS
and such). We have 110 employees, 95 of whom are "technical" (coders,
sysadmins, etc.).

A few months ago we tried to move the 15 non-technical employees
(receptionists, accounting, etc.) to a Linux desktop, to save ourselves from
spiraling Microsoft upgrade costs. We tried several combinations of KDE,
Gnome, and traditional window managers; we also tried both Koffice and
StarOffice for word processing and spreadsheets. (For text editing, vim was
out of the question; emacs was bordering on insanity.) The result? They
hated it, and productivity went down fast. The IS folks' workload tripled
overnight as the Linux newbies got stuck trying to figure out why the
KDE/Gnome desktops were so illogical. We couldn't find a non-IE browser that
would work with our bank's site, so bookkeeping needed a Windows PC
regardless (which they tended to fight over, since nobody liked Linux).
People would hit the reset button when X died or crashed, and the resulting
fsck would take half their filesystem with it. It was a nightmare.

Today our non-techies run Windows and our coders mostly run Linux, just as
before. And it works (relatively) well. There are crashes and annoyances on
the Windows side but at least it's usable. Linux simply isn't up to the task
yet - and with funding for open source projects going down the toilet as
LNUX, SGI, CALD, and RHAT slowly die off, things aren't going to change
anytime soon.
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---------------------------------






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