Posted on 08/11/2011 5:48:55 AM PDT by ShadowAce
It also sounds like someone who has never owned a motor vehicle, home or GIRLFRIEND! All require a healthy amount of moolah to keep in top performance (especially the girlfriend!)
Generally, Yes. Almost all of the Linux based word processors write & read .doc file format. But, there are some things in recent MS Office .doc file formats that may cause problems. RTF is pretty universal if you have a failure on that type of document. You can try Abiword ported for Windows to test and see if it will work for you. It is not an office suite, but a pretty fair word processor and it is a light application. Open Office and Libra Office are much more advanced if you want to try them.
Go to http://www.linuxlinks.com and look at the software listing.
The word processors are here: http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Wordprocessors
Abiword is downloadable here: http://www.abisource.com/download/
I am of the opinion that computers (and the software that runs on them) are basically tools. If someone wrote an article that said that “Just because I love my shovel does that mean I have to hate my rake?” (notice I didn’t say hoe LOL), that would be an absurd statement, at least in my view. The analogy is perhaps not an exact one but it gets the point across.
I admit to being a bit of a linux fanboy myself, but my rational side would say “just use the best tool for the job”.
“I prefer not having to upgrade or outright replace my computer every time a new version of the OS comes out. (typing this on a 6 year old Dell, that was at best middle of the road for performance when it was new) “
^^^^^^^^^
I’m typing this on a 10-year old computer with 512MB RAM on Ubuntu 10.10 and it handles fine. I’m going to move it to Linux Mint XFCE and it will be even quicker.
Bump. Flame Wars suck.
XFCE is great.
I'm a retired engineer(computers). Been using Linux at home for almost 20 years. It works. It does everything I need. Never had a virus. Never had a data lose. Never had a security problem.
Before retiring, I had to deal with that POS(Windows). Never again!
There is quite simply not a day that goes by that I don’t interact with both Windows and Linux for all sorts of tasks both work and personal. I can only conclude that they each have their strengths and their place - else one would have driven the other out of the workplace and/or the home.
I have a windows laptop at work that does exactly one thing - outlook. It's basically a couple of thousand dollars worth of an email terminal, because the underlying OS just doesn't work the way I do.
I need multiple desktops, and a real shell with tools that will actually let me automate stuff that would otherwise take far too much of my time, or not be possible at all without an in-house programmer. I need to have direct shell access both to and from my box, along with a webserver, ftp (anonymous only), and scp server so I can move files from one place to another without the hassel of 'shares', and other artificial weirdness.
I'm sure windows is fine for people who don't actually have to do multiple tasks simultaneously, and can focus on their one program they are working on at the moment. I'm sure it's fine for people who don't value their time enough to put up with scanning for viruses, malware, and other crap that seems to be attracted to Microsoft operating systems like a big Hoover vacuum. I just don't have the time to mess with all the crap that comes with being a MS-Windows user.
I also like knowing that by backing up my /home partition, even after a catastrophic disk failure, I can get my entire system back within a few hours (most of that time is the data restore) in exactly the same condition it was today right down to the individual tweaks I've made to my personal desktop settings.
I'm glad there is choice out there. Different people like different things. Different people have different needs and requirements. Thank God we have the ability to choose that which works best for us as individuals. Mac users can be happy, MS-Windows users can be happy, and Linux users can be happy because they have what is best for them.
As a service tech, I feel your pain. I very much prefer linux, but my business is driven by an ability to fix windows. So i am invariably drawn back to, and basically stuck on windows. It's ubiquity is it's greatest strength.
However, IMHO, there are parts of this OP which do not ring true - It is no easy thing to set up a cross-platform network with linux either, especially for a n00b... Samba config is one of my biggest b*tches about linux, and one of the most important things left undone by automated installation processes. Printers and peripherals are not always easy either. And Man pages necessary to linux config are probably worse than the troubleshooting available for windows - if for no other reason than the sheer number of manpages available - and their relatively obscure locations. I have literally scoured the web for days trying to solve a bug or annoyance.
There is no question that Linux is the superior system, by nearly every measurable standard. But by the same token, to the uninitiated, it is also the more difficult to manage. I service some few SOHO and residential Linux boxen, and those brave individuals have had a tremendous learning curve to accomplish. Not that that is entirely a bad thing - informed users are safe users. but I am still loathe to create a linux installation that doesn't pick up everything from a live disk run or a WUBI install... Those occasions where I deny Linux to a client are becoming less frequent, to be sure (Ubuntu was the hallmark distro that really changed that drastically), but still more often than I would prefer.
In that perfect condition, a n00b can be up and running (functional) in mere hours, operating quite freely using most apps, and functioning well in most user-only type operations... But the journey from n00b to intermediate level (say, power user) is an excruciating process.
Much ado about nothing - most virus authors have gotten around UAC by now... and that is the main sec difference between XP and Vista/Seven. Give me 20 seconds on a win 7 box (ANY win platform actually) as a guest and I can be sitting on a SYSTEM desktop (not Admin now, but SYSTEM). I do it all the time in order to kill tough bugs or delete files that will not die... getting admin on a cold start is a piece of cake. So is shutting off UAC on the next restart from a cold box... elevating from user, too. nothing has changed much.
Politics and sports are similar, once you pick a side, you tend to hate on the opposition.. just human nature. I try my best to avoid that.
Oh, you ain't kidding! One particularly egregious example: I was once doing some programming work with my laptop in a customer's facility. When I wanted to print, I naturally decided to use one of their networked printers and downloaded the "driver" (70MB!!). So then I install the thing, and it gives me all sorts of spyware and other feces-ware along with the driver. So I use Windows uninstall, which WAS provided, on the other crap, and it uninstalls the driver along with!!
They've designed their crap to actively PREVENT you from cleaning it out of your system, by taking the 2MB you actually WANT along with it! Crapware being provided with drivers has been a severe pet peeve of mine ever since and I make it a point to defeat it, even if it might be harmless in a given case, just on the principle.
VMware (and other VM software for all I know) will let you clone an existing physical machine into a VM that you can run on your Linux box. See, no Notes reinstall required! It doesn't even know it's running on new (virtualized) hardware. The only way I could see that not working is if Notes has copy protection keyed to HD serial numbers or MAC ID's or something like that. Those are probably not coming along to the VM. In a way, running stuff from a VM is even safer IT-wise because you can backup the entire machine and restore it on new hardware even easier than restoring a HD image.
Ping
I still run XP Pro on several video editing PC's at home, but for anything requiring Internet access, I use Linux exclusively. To deal with all the maintenance issues you mentioned above, Windows costs money, time and aggravation. I don't have those issues with Linux. Above all, Windows XP is a virus magnet. I make good money on the side by cleaning up XP machines for clients. At home, I don't have the time or inclination to deal with that mess (especially 'cuz I'm not being paid!). After my son's computer got clobbered twice, I got fed up and started trying various Linux distros. None of the home PC's even run A/V software, but I have yet to identify any problems after two+ years. So, if you have some special application that will only run on Windows, I understand. But, if you don't, try Linux, you might be impressed.
You’re talking about having physical access to the machine. No one is dumb enough to claim secure without physical security.
What you describe means OSX and Linux are just as vulnerable.
The key is over the network attacks and that’s where they security is greatly improved. Now the attacks are pretty much social engineered attacks.
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