Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption

[peter]

Interesting article with this quote:

It is the brave individual who will migrate their organization's desktops to Linux

Not so much a technology failure as a people failure.

http://searchopensource.techtarget.c...165420,00.html

Maybe it would have been better to introduce OpenOffice on the MS desktop, then go to Linux after people got comfortable with it.

I haven't had that much grief with Linux hardware compatibility, but then I like my OS installations to be simple. My biggest problem has been with wireless and NDISwrapper seems to work fine for that.

[jro]

I read this article earlier. I think you are right, people probably would rebel should you replace everything they have gotten comfortable with all at once. But with many open source apps having Win32 counterparts, you can slowly migrate people as they get comfortable.

But as you, and the article said, laptops and wireless can be a relentless issue.

[Compunuts]

This point had been advised in many and countess articles and books about migrating to opensource. The end user (the secretary type) could care less about what OS they are running on (even if they KNOW what OS their computers are running). All they care is their application. As long as the application they use remains the same, they don't care what is under the hood.

The successful migrations should always start with desktop applications such as Office, browser, email programs and the likes. Once you can run those without any problems, then you switch the OS.

I know it's not this easy to do (but what is?). That's why I support Sun's effort to keep StarOffice and OpenOffice separated. If you buy StarOffice, you can get MS compartible modules that will seemlessly integrate with MS Office file formats. If your ORG absolutely need this kind of compartibility, then you should opt for StarOffice (and pay some $$ for those excellent programmers).

I use OpenOffice and MS Office both. I can easily open up XSL files but I will lose the formatting (which is no big deal for me).