Constructing a Windows-Less Office 638
joewakeup writes "This article at CRN analyses why today is the best time to consider building a pure Linux information system, from servers to... desktop. Among all the arguments, one of the arguments is the low cost of Linux offerings compared to Windows based-solutions. Worth a read."
Depends on your office... (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that there's almost no development community addressing this potentially enormous market amazes me to no end.
But, until then, I'll use Windows. Not because it's great, but because it has the apps I need.
Re:A catch-22. (Score:2, Interesting)
Gnome they can understand. KDE they can understand. And I try to run them on a PII-333 with 128MB of RAM, and the whole system grinds to a halt. And that's before they even start up Abi-word.
Two Critical Appps that will help... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A catch-22. (Score:3, Interesting)
NT is stable, fast, and very decently priced these days. If I'm an office manager, what's my incentive for trying to go to Linux?
What about MS Exchange? (Score:3, Interesting)
Slackware 8.0 running FVWM (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Slackware 8.0 running FVWM (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:But Microsoft abuses the users because they can (Score:2, Interesting)
*office documents: demand that people send you the data as XML or HTML or RTF or TXT or any of the other zillions of formats available. if they will not: pout.
*web browsing: the only place Linux falls down is on terribly designed web pages and Flash. those sites are not worth viewing anyway. consider yourself rescued from bad web pages.
*games: you kids today and your fancy 3D rendering. in my day, games had 256 colors if they were lucky... some games were drawn in mono as vector graphics, other games relied solely on that faculty known as the imagination-- and presented the entire experience using only the written word. In fact, the more I play the new games, the more I like the older games. Once in a while I even use these analog games that rely on having people in the room with me. It's kind of fun!
As you can see, either you have an employment-related restriction and you can either try and find a new job (I know the desire to not use Windows at work makes me think about this once in a while, but on the whole it's unrealistic-- and they're paying for MS stuff, not me) or you have a comfort level that you seem to think you need. If you fall into this latter camp, all I can say is that comfort is relative, you have to weigh the comfort of interoperability/etc with the comfort of Free Software.
Re:What about MS Exchange? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since it's a database you have option called deleted item retention time. When a user deletes an email it stays hidden in the database for whatever amount of time you specify. If you have the storage it could be months or years. If someone deletes an email message restoration takes seconds from the client PC. Exchange 2000 takes it one step further to the mailbox level. If you delete a mailbox by accident or after a termination, you can restore the mailbox with all contents.
Backup is easy. And Veritas even has an option called brick level back up which backs up the mailboxes individually. A company called Commvault takes this to a new level and can back up single messages. If you CEO deletes an email you just restore the message. If you delete a mailbox and someone needs it you just restore the single mailbox.
Is there anything that runs on Unix or Linux that supports these features? On an enterprise level they are a requirement.
Linux installation experience (Score:5, Interesting)
I ripped Windows off at about the same last year and installed Linux. I wasn't impressed. The desktop managers seemed slow (I was running a P3-800) and the web-browser sucked and generally, the applications weren't as good as their Windows counterparts. Not to mention that I managed to crash the system and have ext2 throw away some files.
So, this weekend I tried it again. I ripped off Windows 2000 and installed RedHat 7.2. In one year, Linux (and Gnome / KDE) has improved ten-fold. The KDE browser rocks, KMail is very good and the ext3fs filesystem is much better. However, it still took me hours to get ADSL PPPOE and a VPN client up and running and the soundcard (VIA 8233) and tv-card (Brooktree) still don't work. Apparently, the concept of writing a device driver without patching the kernel is still impossible even though Windows/Mac have been doing it for many years. And the system (now an Tbird-1.33) is still slower than Windows 2K (ex., the mouse gets jerky when my apps thrash the disk).
I'm a developer, so I'm thinking of writing support for some of these things (such as an easy VPN installer). Or, maybe a universal driver installer that would automagically patch the kernel and say 'You must reboot now', ala Windows. But the thought of having to support different distributions and versions makes me cringe.
Alot of the problems in Windows can be attributed to Microsoft trying to be backwards-compatible. But with Linux, the kernel and major libraries (ie. glibc) are always changing underneath your feet. This is a major design flaw that I not sure can ever be rectified.
Jason.
my office (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux/Afterstep/LTSP/Clueless roommate (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:A catch-22. (Score:3, Interesting)
Could it be that you are not installing properly? As an MCSE I have yet to see a hardware platform which performed better on NT 4.0 than on a good Linux install.
As an Network Administrator (MCSE certified) my incentive for NT is currently that I do not have a strong enough grasp of Samba to replace my NT boxes for authentication from windows clients (and I have windows clients everywhere). I have replaced almost all of my application server functions with a good Unixware install (if such a beast exists) I am very pleased with Unix reliability and currently use Linux for some network monitoring. I will be replacing Exchange with a Linux based platform very soon. Happy Day!!!
Life is like a box of chocolates....
Too much of it will make you sick
Needed: a replacement for PowerPoint (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a good open source project. The initial version doesn't have to support animation, but design in the hooks, and it will probably be added by others. Perl code to read and write Flash exists, so there's something to look at. A good student programming project.
Re:A catch-22. (Score:0, Interesting)
It Worked For Us (Score:2, Interesting)
Does this make sense to you? (Score:2, Interesting)
Think about that for a moment.
How can windows + linux be cheaper than just windows?
Free (beer) isn't free (beer) (Score:4, Interesting)
Things "get into" the office environment when they make business sense to do so. Which happens when the benefits exceed the costs, the reward exceeds the risk, and when these are exceeded by an amount greater than the next best alternative.
In the case of office platforms, the big "corporate IT" issue re this analysis in representing the complete true costs - Total Cost of Ownership - which includes the relative expense of good Unix sysadmins or the cost of retraining Win admins (clue injection), the cost of managing the environments, the cost of supporting moronic end users, the costs of reduced application availability (sure you can have a nice GUI, but where's the Linux industrial-strength Accounts Payable system?), or of building interfaces to whatever the rest of the world uses (eg., the cost of reverse engineering .doc format for word processing). The actual cost of the OS (free beer) is almost irrelevant.
On the risk side, corporate IT departments value stability of the infrastructure above all. So, the corporate IT folks are herd-following conformists. No one will move to Linux office until everyone else does. And there will have to be a huge TCO advantage before that inertia gets overcome.
It's actually a rational position, but not very cool or fun. Sticking with the herd, and moving en masse with the herd has advanatges. The herd is big enough that it gets what it wants: robust techinical support, business applications developed for the platform of their choice, peer groups and conferences in Boca Raton, whatever.
Of course, you lose out on the advanatges of doing something different/better than competitors. It all depends on what you value more.
(PHB off)
Just kidding of course. This was posted from a Linux system hiding in a 50,000 person company.
Re:A catch-22. (Score:4, Interesting)
Since these boxes are going to be on a network anyhow, why not simply use underpowered machines as X terminals. Any machine with 16M of ram has enough oomph to be an X terminal, and one commodity server (with enough memory) can easily support hundreds of users.
As far as I am concerned the only real reason to take a look at Linux on the desktop is that it finally allows the systems administrators to move to a useable thin client arrangement. Imagine the joys of one box to administer and nothing but disposable machines on your users' dekstops. Linux has finally gotten to the point where it has enough applications to allow you to shift to this sort of a setup today. The fact that this sort of an arrangement will probably save you money on both software and hardware costs is nothing more than icing on the cake. The real potential for savings is in administration costs. All of a sudden you can get rid of all of your desktop support personnel and replace them with one Linux admin, and a monkey whose sole job would be to replace failed thin clients.
Cyrus IMAPd (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, it's a sealed environment, so you don't have to have OS-level user accounts for mail users -- a security bonus.
Re:Depends on your office... (Score:4, Interesting)
I want to program a bit. But I'm not so into it to purchase Visual C++ for $???. I occasionally type a letter or resume, but $200 for Word/WordPerfect? I don't do that much letter writing.
So I use Linux. Most of the stuff I need is out there. For games I have M$. But when games require XP? I think I'll just go buy a PS2. Or go outside and look at that bright yellow thing.
Re:Migrating between platforms is not impossible (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, very, very few people involved in the development of the Linux operating system care much about usability. They are much more interested in adding the latest whiz-bang feature, but it doesn't seem to bother them that their app must be installed on a command line that is unintelligible to 99% of the computing population.
The few folks that DO care about usability (Ximian) are doing great things - unfortunately, it just isn't enough. They are working on the GUI, an email client, etc. but there are so many more usability problems with the OS than just that.
Re:Pointless (Score:3, Interesting)
Can they run all the games that are released each year, even low-tech stuff like Roller Coaster Tycoon? Can they run all the kids' software available at Toys 'R Us? Can they shop at Internet Explorer-specific web sites? Can they run Photoshop and Premiere, if they needed to?
The bottom line is and always has been this: People want to be able to run the software that's out there. That's it. That's all. I've been a Mac user in the past, and it is frustrating any time you have to do something where all users are assumed to be running Windows. It's not worth being idealistic about it.
Re:Needed: a replacement for PowerPoint (Score:3, Interesting)
I also have trouble with the people who run around saying Flash Web pages won't open in Linux. They do for me, no problem. Netscape + Flash plugin.
I use Linux to perform common home and office computing tasks all day, every day, without even thinking about it. Right now my net connection is through a Wavelan card that worked "out of the box" with no fuss in Mandrake 8.0.
What am I doing wrong with Linux? Apparently there is *something* I haven't figured out that makes Linux hard to use. I have grandchildren who use Linux without any problem (we're talking five years old). My wife's great aunt, who is in her 90s, learned how to make at least minimal use of Netscape on Linux in a few minutes. Her biggest problem is that arthritis makes it hard for her to type.
Perhaps what I'm doing wrong is using point/click "user friendly" distributions like Mandrake and SuSE. Yeah, that's it! Maybe if I dump this silly X Window thingie and use Slack from the command line only, I'll have trouble performing simple home/office tasks with Linux.
Now, I can see an ubergeek sysadmin or developer trying to teach a bunch of journalists or other non-tech people how to type in a string of commands that look something like 0adsfkf($#@!) to open and edit a simple text file and getting a lot of bemused stares in return. Mr. Geek affirms his superiority, and everyone else decides Linux is too hard for them and goes back to Windows.
My wife, an artist-type person without a tech bone in her body (psych major, spent most of her working life before she met me as an IRS clerical employee), learned to use Linux as an online working tool in (I swear) less than two hours.
I mentioned my wife's great aunt. She's black, she grew up in rural poverty, only got through 4th grade, and has been a cleaning woman/maid for damn near her entire life. When I hear someone with a college degree, working in a white collar job, complain about Linux being hard to use, something is wrong with either the person doing the complaining or the person who taught them.
But to each their own. I am not as smart as most Slashdot readers, so I have to do things the simplest way, not the most technically elegant, and I have learned to accept the fact that this makes me uncool, even though it allows me to get one hell of a lot of work done in Linux without having to know very much about what's happening behind the monitor screen,
- Robin
denial (Score:2, Interesting)
bug off, troll (Score:2, Interesting)
It surely runs 98/nt pretty well too. But forget about win2k. Too much bloat for the old k6. Tried once, no luck.
Re:My office is Window-less (Score:2, Interesting)
We have multiple platforms including many MacOS, Windows, and linux machines. Our users range from complete computer phobics to folks doing heavy software development work. It has not been my experience that Macs are any cheaper to set-up or support. In fact we seem to need a higher Mac sys admin to Mac user ratio than we need for Windows or linux users. Part of the reason might be the natural selection process which appears to draw the least computer literate towards Macs. Then when something goes wrong they're the least equipt to deal with it. Or matbe Windows users have been "trained" to complain less.
About three years ago I did a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study of our platforms. At the time the industry standard TCO was about $9000/yr for desktop machines. Our entire organization put it at about $4300/yr for Windows machines. Within my smaller group of departmental desktop machines the TCO was something like $1900/yr. An interesting tidbit was that for the big unix platforms (Sun/SGI) it was $4000-5000/yr, for Windows and Macs about $1700 and for linux machines about $1300/yr (I may not remember the correct number but linux was cheaper). These numbers were calculated based on the first three years of ownership. The highest cost items were hardware, staff support time, back room servers, and software licensing (we license an awlful lot of software, even on linux (stuff like Matlab, mathematica, Maple, Adobe stuff, etc) but get educational rates).
While a Mac G4 at $1200 is cheap I can also buy a Dell P4 or a locally built AMD 1.5 GHz Athlon with more memory for $700. A number of non Apple vendors make LCD screens with 1600x1400 resolutions (Viewsonic, IBM, NEC come immediately to mind).
Platforms come and go so it's best to not fixate too strongly on any one of them.
Out-of-Office Maintenance and Troubleshooting (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Really?!?!?! Really. (Score:2, Interesting)
OK, Linux is more secure. Linux is more stable. Linux is easier to use. Linux is easier to maintain. Linux is easier to modify. Linux avoids the data loss propriatory applications cause by changing their formats and interfaces. Linux programs can easily share data. Linux has much better and more flexible foundations.
The article did well to consider a single aspect. Don't we all know that each of the above statements is blantantly obvious? The points must be made one at a time to overcome the billions of dollars M$ has put into adverts and FUD. PHBs will nod in agreement as they consider the world around them, but they lack a basis for compairison. Articles like this build up that basis, while mentioning the other points. Throw them in your PHB's face at once is not polite. No one likes feeling like a sucker.
Reference Neiven's Protector: At some point you wake up and think, "I've been stupid".