Posted on 08/31/2015 6:37:23 AM PDT by ShadowAce
I’ve got a new machine running Ubuntu and a very old laptop dual booting XP and Mint. The latter will go only Mint as I sort through all the legacy stuff and move what I need to keep.
With the most recent LibreOffice (version 5), users are able to read/write Office formats much better than with earlier versions of LibreOffice--including tables and other formatting issues that have popped up before.
As far as I know, there is still no substitute for Vizio in terms of reading/writing the file formats.
Everything else, though, seems pretty straightforward--unless you are using some industry-unique, custom software, of course.
That has not been my experience.
Ping
True. I haven’t seen any problems with Linux hardware support. For basic operations, it does just fine. I also find it simpler to use than a Mac.
You know this guy lost 99.999% of Windows users at the word “distro”, don’t you? And VM?
Not the ones thinking of switching.
Yup, lost me.
There are exactly two applications and only two, that require that I use Liunx, MS Project and MS Visio.
For MS Project there is ProjectLibre which is good enough for me but almost all of my customers us MS Project. I am thinking about switching over so this may not be an issue any longer.
For MS Visio there is Dia and yEd but neither support the stencils from network equipment manufactures. My only use of Visio is for network diagrams so this tends to make things really tough.
Otherwise, I have no need for Windows.
Ugh, I should proof read my posts. First sentance should read:
There are exactly two applications, and only two that require I use Windows.
I haven't used anything but linux for a desktop for years and years.
This is being posted from a Mint machine.
Whatever works for folks... I have yet to meet anyone that has real, persistant hardware problems.
I darn sure haven't and use linux pretty hard, including open-office.
/johnny
It really depends on the machine. If you’re talking a computer with built-in graphics on the motherboard like what Intel has, then it’s relatively okay; but if you’re talking a third-party graphics card using AMD (neé ATI) or NVidia chipsets, that’s a different story.
I dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows XP on a couple of older general-purpose computers, mainly for security reasons. It’s great for most applications, such as email & web browsing, and Libre Office gives very good compatibility with (most) popular Microsoft Office files. (I don’t play games, so that’s not even a consideration...)
There are a handful of music recording/production and video editing programs that I use, necessitating that I not entirely abandon Windows. Ironically, newer versions of some of these won’t run on XP, either. So I also have to have something running Win 7, 8 or 10.
I could try some of those XP programs in compatibility mode or in a VM, but I’m not sure about the performance hit I may take running in a VM.
I think Linux is a great choice for XP hangers-on who risk serious damage from the insecure nature of this now-abandoned OS, and have set-up machines for several of my friends to help protect them.
Nope--I've been using an NVidia graphics cards (not built-in) since 2003 without issues.
You might want to consider installing Wine to see if you can use those two applications within Linux. I've had great success with Wine on a Linux desktop. You may be able to have your cake and eat it, too.
I'm surprised the author did not include that as an option.
Amen. I've had good success with Ubuntu, but have run into a couple of machines on which it has repeatedly failed to install, and a Dell Latitude laptop that won't work with it's built-in wireless adapter. It does, however, work just fine with a USB wireless device.
Herein lies the advantage of running from a live CD/DVD and testing everything before committing to dual-booting or replacing your OS outright.
Agreed. I tend to perform a lot of research before my computer purchases, though. A major part of my research involves chipsets, and compliance with standards.
Using those standards, I tend to buy more from generic suppliers and white box builders than I do major brands, with a few exceptions.
My current laptop is an MSI GT680R. I purchased it (in 2010) with 8GB of RAM but have upgraded it to 16GB. It's got hardware RAIDed dual HDDs and a quad-core i7. The HDMI, wireless, DVD, dual-monitors, all networking, NVidia graphics, sound--everything on it--just works.
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