3 ms·
2009 was a break out year for linux on the desktop for the people around me. In my company, linux has begun to bleed into non-technical departments. I convinc
by clavalle 17y ago
2009 was a break out year for linux on the desktop for the people around me. In my company, linux has begun to bleed into non-technical departments. I convinced my aging parents to dump Windows, my acupuncturist brother in law, my wife etc. etc.
With more of an emphasis on console games as opposed to games on the desktop and with 80% or more of a user's time being spent on the browser on desktops, I only see it getting easier to transition people to Linux in business and at home. At my company, the plan is to transition everyone to Linux with two exceptions, testers so we can test compatibility (though those are run on VMs anyway) and old employees who are MSOffice power users that the learning curve for OpenOffice and the few missing features is too much for them to bear (and it is worth the few hundred bucks of licensing fees not to hear their complaining)...this amounts to two, maybe three people out of over 75...all developers and operations and most product sales consultants and engineers are already on Linux.
- berlinbrown 17y agoWere there any issues with converting over? Did you hear about any issues.
- clavalle 17y agoThe devs had no problems. Operations absolutely loved the change. We heard fears just before the change from people with the most direct client contact (sales and client support engineers/consultants) who where mostly worried about Office document compatibility. We had them try without the crutch and heard very few complaints after a week or so of cutting their teeth. Our main pain point was getting off Exchange. We tested a few different replacements with varying levels of success (blackberry issues, mostly) but once GMail came out of beta we just went with that. Our second biggest issue was display drivers and some lingering confusion about small day-to-day things...but overall our one desktop support guy is very happy with us. All in all I expected the transition to be a lot more painful than it was...even our non-technical staff is pretty technical so we might have it easier than most.