3 ms·

SELECT CONCAT (YEAR(GETDATE()),' is the year of linux on the desktop!');

by DKnoll 11y ago

DKnoll 11y ago
As a Linux user myself I guess I'll have to explain... I have been hearing this since I was a child screwing around with Knoppix in the early 00s (this will sound really impressive in about 20 years but at least one person reading this is rolling their eyes because they were discussing Linux on comp.os.minix in 1991). End users do not care about the things you care about, especially if you is the FSF. You will need to sell users on something more than a vague notion of 'freedom' if you would like them to buy into OSS. The Linux desktop has come a long way but it still comes nowhere near the ease of use and universality of Windows as a workstation OS. To the user, Windows is just a vehicle for Microsoft Office. Try using LibreOffice in an actual office environment, sharing documents with MS Office users and then tell me how ready Linux is for the desktop.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  The one thing Linux excels at over any other platform I've tried is for embedded development. Try mounting a dd image anywhere else and you'll see what I mean.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  As someone who used to make a living trying to get Word Perfect to share documents with Word, I can tell you that it is a near impossible thing. The main problem is that the file format relies on the behaviour of the Word formatter to work in a particular way. If you wrote a word processor and decided for yourself how it should format, then there is virtually no way you can figure out from the contents of a doc or docx file exactly how it should be formatted (and conversely no way to take what you have rendered and write a doc or docx file that will render it the same way). The only way to do it would be to write a complete clone of the Word formatter, which is essentially impossible because if you look at the docx spec you will realize that even MS don't know how it works. Of course, this is a technical issue that compounds a political problem -- MS enjoy a monopoly on office products and those office products happen to be essentially impossible to clone because they are ancient, idiosyncratic, legacy monsters. The only way to fix the problem is to get people to stop using those legacy apps --- which is pretty much unlikely. Linux is more than ready for the desktop. It is unlikely ever to interoperate seemlessly with MS Office, though. Still, the office in which I work has switched completely to Chrome OS and Google apps. The school I worked in before that has switched to Open Office and actually forbids the use of MS Office (because of interoperability issues). Who knows...
  - DKnoll 11y ago
    I understand that Microsoft does not make Office very interoperable, but whatever the reason for that is, anything but a basic document tends to get garbled formatting. Perhaps I misinterpreted, but I took friends to include the non-technical who would be set back by this.. definitely if they send out resumes looking like a madman who's never used a word processor. The Canadian government and the vast majority of businesses I know of use Office, so that would also be a hindrance. Sorry for the pragmatism.. I also probably shouldn't have written the query for MSSQL...
    - mikekchar 11y ago
      It's not entirely true. Word import and export is not perfect, but it's relatively good in Libre Office. You don't have to use Linux to verify that claim. There will be some sticking points, though: - Round trips will be problematic. So if you export to doc and then reimport and then export again you will likely have some difficulty. - Some things won't work (like multi-page footnotes) because Word formats them incorrectly. This will affect pagination, but probably will be fine for most things other than legal documents. - Fonts can be a problem. If you don't install the same fonts you can have font metric problems. This isn't really an issue because it is easy to install the same fonts. Some Linux distros don't make it easy because the fonts are non-free (as in freedom), though. I worked for 5 years teaching English and for 4 or those years I had to interoperate with people using Office (they were forced to use Open Office in the 5th year because the school board decided not to renew their MS licenses). I was making very complicated documents with precise layout, multi-lingual fonts (Japanese and English), and many pictures. I very rarely had any problems. Don't get me wrong. I hate Open Office with a passion (and I'm glad that as a programmer once again I never have to touch it). But it's not really much different than Word in that respect ;-) Some work flows are just impossible, though. If you are group editing a document and marking it up as you pass it around a group, then it just won't work because there will be too many round trips. As I said, there will be pagination issues for very complex formatting and so it is not possible to use for legal work (most people who do serious legal work use Word Perfect, though, because Word's formatting is broken). As for resumes, I always avoided sending doc files to people for fear that someone would try to edit it. I always send PDFs. However, in the few cases where I was not allowed to submit anything other than a doc file (for example my teaching job), I had absolutely no trouble. YMMV. And for what it's worth, the programmers at Microsoft actually work very hard at keeping things as interoperable as they can (as far as I can tell). It's just that they have a massively huge legacy app and it's hard to work with. The MS QAs even used to send me bug reports when Word Perfect outputted poor doc files. I'm not a fan of MS, but in the course of my career I've worked with a lot of past and present MS programmers/QAs. I don't have a bad word to say about any of them. In fact, when we did some joint ventures with MS while I was at Corel, the QAs we worked with were some of the best I've ever met.

SELECT CONCAT (YEAR(GETDATE()),' is the year of linux on the desktop!');

by DKnoll 11y ago

SELECT CONCAT (YEAR(GETDATE()),' is the year of linux on the desktop!');

As a Linux user myself I guess I'll have to explain... I have been hearing this since I was a child screwing around with Knoppix in the early 00s (this will sound really impressive in about 20 years but at least one person reading this is rolling their eyes because they were discussing Linux on comp.os.minix in 1991). End users do not care about the things you care about, especially if you is the FSF. You will need to sell users on something more than a vague notion of 'freedom' if you would like them to buy into OSS. The Linux desktop has come a long way but it still comes nowhere near the ease of use and universality of Windows as a workstation OS. To the user, Windows is just a vehicle for Microsoft Office. Try using LibreOffice in an actual office environment, sharing documents with MS Office users and then tell me how ready Linux is for the desktop.

jschwartzi 11y ago
The one thing Linux excels at over any other platform I've tried is for embedded development. Try mounting a dd image anywhere else and you'll see what I mean.
mikekchar 11y ago
As someone who used to make a living trying to get Word Perfect to share documents with Word, I can tell you that it is a near impossible thing. The main problem is that the file format relies on the behaviour of the Word formatter to work in a particular way. If you wrote a word processor and decided for yourself how it should format, then there is virtually no way you can figure out from the contents of a doc or docx file exactly how it should be formatted (and conversely no way to take what you have rendered and write a doc or docx file that will render it the same way). The only way to do it would be to write a complete clone of the Word formatter, which is essentially impossible because if you look at the docx spec you will realize that even MS don't know how it works. Of course, this is a technical issue that compounds a political problem -- MS enjoy a monopoly on office products and those office products happen to be essentially impossible to clone because they are ancient, idiosyncratic, legacy monsters. The only way to fix the problem is to get people to stop using those legacy apps --- which is pretty much unlikely. Linux is more than ready for the desktop. It is unlikely ever to interoperate seemlessly with MS Office, though. Still, the office in which I work has switched completely to Chrome OS and Google apps. The school I worked in before that has switched to Open Office and actually forbids the use of MS Office (because of interoperability issues). Who knows...
- DKnoll 11y ago
  I understand that Microsoft does not make Office very interoperable, but whatever the reason for that is, anything but a basic document tends to get garbled formatting. Perhaps I misinterpreted, but I took friends to include the non-technical who would be set back by this.. definitely if they send out resumes looking like a madman who's never used a word processor. The Canadian government and the vast majority of businesses I know of use Office, so that would also be a hindrance. Sorry for the pragmatism.. I also probably shouldn't have written the query for MSSQL...
  - mikekchar 11y ago
    It's not entirely true. Word import and export is not perfect, but it's relatively good in Libre Office. You don't have to use Linux to verify that claim. There will be some sticking points, though: - Round trips will be problematic. So if you export to doc and then reimport and then export again you will likely have some difficulty. - Some things won't work (like multi-page footnotes) because Word formats them incorrectly. This will affect pagination, but probably will be fine for most things other than legal documents. - Fonts can be a problem. If you don't install the same fonts you can have font metric problems. This isn't really an issue because it is easy to install the same fonts. Some Linux distros don't make it easy because the fonts are non-free (as in freedom), though. I worked for 5 years teaching English and for 4 or those years I had to interoperate with people using Office (they were forced to use Open Office in the 5th year because the school board decided not to renew their MS licenses). I was making very complicated documents with precise layout, multi-lingual fonts (Japanese and English), and many pictures. I very rarely had any problems. Don't get me wrong. I hate Open Office with a passion (and I'm glad that as a programmer once again I never have to touch it). But it's not really much different than Word in that respect ;-) Some work flows are just impossible, though. If you are group editing a document and marking it up as you pass it around a group, then it just won't work because there will be too many round trips. As I said, there will be pagination issues for very complex formatting and so it is not possible to use for legal work (most people who do serious legal work use Word Perfect, though, because Word's formatting is broken). As for resumes, I always avoided sending doc files to people for fear that someone would try to edit it. I always send PDFs. However, in the few cases where I was not allowed to submit anything other than a doc file (for example my teaching job), I had absolutely no trouble. YMMV. And for what it's worth, the programmers at Microsoft actually work very hard at keeping things as interoperable as they can (as far as I can tell). It's just that they have a massively huge legacy app and it's hard to work with. The MS QAs even used to send me bug reports when Word Perfect outputted poor doc files. I'm not a fan of MS, but in the course of my career I've worked with a lot of past and present MS programmers/QAs. I don't have a bad word to say about any of them. In fact, when we did some joint ventures with MS while I was at Corel, the QAs we worked with were some of the best I've ever met.