Her laptop has been running LinuxMint for a few days now. She has no clue. I had set her up with Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice a couple years ago. Since she only uses Internet, email, Docs, and picture viewing /editing, (I taught her on Photoshop and GIMP is almost identical) she doesn't realize I swapped her OS on Friday night. Both her Network printers work and she can still click a link to view her pics on the server upstairs. I'd say the WAF, (Wife Acceptance Factor) of the latest modern versions of Linux fully passes the test. Her only comments were "I love the new fonts you gave me" and "Why is this so much faster?" and "It's cool that the picture icons on my desktop are thumbnails" She may never know. She also thinks all my Linux books and talk over the past 3 years were a little geeky. Don't tell her!
COOL!!! I can't wait until I can get me a laptop (saving up the $$ money for it now) and put something other than winblows on it! Anybody have a source for getting a laptop sans an OS? Wherever I can save some money, it would be worth it.
Check the yellow pages for local one guy operations. Most, if not all, can build you a machine for relatively short money and load it with anything (or nothing) you want on it. Based on my experience, it's the only way to fly, good results with a tower and an el-cheapo lappy.
I switched my wife over and she still doesn't know, if all they do is email, Internet, docs, photo stuff they won't have a clue as long as everything they are use to works My kids figured it out at the log in screen
Most of my business runs proprietary software such as MS Project, MS Office, Excel, ACT; I have to have these programs; do they run with Linux?
You know Linux has it's own Project Management software, looks just like MS Project but I've never tried to import anything into it so not sure how it would convert As far as office goes, OpenOffice will open/read/write/save to MS format, the only thing I've seen are some macro problems from time to time but for your general office doc no problems
Some have alternatives but personally I use multiple VMs (Virtual Machines) for all my necessary Windows tasks. Considering I write a fair amount of Windows software as well as network and server support for Microsoft operating systems and use Visual Studio, etc. I can attest to the fact that VMs serve me just fine... For those who just need IE on Linux try this out, IEs 4 Linux
Sea, I'd not recommend it on your main work machine. You can't afford to be down and the learning curve will catch you unable to do something without help and will end up getting very frustrated. I know OpenOffice would take care of all your Word, PP and Excel needs. There would be other work arounds for almost anything else. <exile> is right. VMware server is free and opens up an XP computer from within Linux. Took me about 3 minutes to set up. But, I'd not do it unless you had a 'play' machine to screw around with first. I made that mistake a few yrs ago and it took me awhile to get back to Linux after that experience.
