a great read

[Ajit Ranade <akr00@xxxxxxxxx>]

this is a great read. 

http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/200104/200104.htm

it's about "The Conversion of Troubleshooters.Com".
the post is long. it describes the transition from
Windows to Linux as a long, difficult process
requiring advanced planning and discipline. as the
author says "it's a process far more costly than
licensing new versions of Windows every 3 years. it's
very tempting to take the course of least resistance
and stick with Windows. On the desktop, at least, that
was a tempting alternative even for my small company.
Sure, Windows crashed all the time, but is moving
Troubleshooters.Com to a Linux desktop worth 40 hours
of my labor? That's about what it took. Believe me,
spending $400 or whatever on Windows 2000 would have
been cheap. So why did I switch?" 

an excerpt follows. do read the whole thing! 

<excerpt>

In late 1999 I made it a goal to transition to Linux
by July of 2000. The date was quite arbitrary -- it
simply seemed like much more than enough time. 
Using Caldera desktop Linux, I began experimenting
heavily with the Linux desktop. It was slow as
molasses on my old Pentium 150. I upgraded that box
from 32Meg to 96Meg, but it just wasn't fast. 

So in February 2000 I bought a dual Celeron 450 with
512Meg and 20Gig in February 2000. I threw Caldera
Linux on it and got to work, secretly hoping I could
transition before my publicly stated July 2000 cutover
date. 

During the next couple months I bounced from distro to
distro -- Caldera, then Corel (what a mess), then
finally I settled on Mandrake. I've been a Mandrake
Man ever since. 

As my July 2000 date neared, I got disappointment
after disappointment. PPP was much harder to configure
than Windows dial up networking. Cut and paste was not
consistent across all apps like it is in the Windows
world. Hotkeys were inconsistent across apps, to the
extent that in many apps the main menu wasn't
accessible through Alt keys. The mouse was pitifully
slow, and cranking up the acceleration just made it
even more difficult to use. There appeared to be no
equivalents for my beloved Micrografx Windows Draw
vector drawing program, or the Paintshop Pro version 3
that I used on a daily basis to finish off my drawings
on a pixel by pixel basis. Although early on Klyx
looked like it might be a good replacement for
Microsoft Word in writing long books, in fact it
wasn't. There was no outliner. I couldn't get Hylafax
faxing software to work. Kmail looked like a poor
replacement for my beloved Eudora Lite. Netscape
Composer, the mainstay of Troubleshooters.Com, had
bugs and behaved in an unexpected manner under Linux.
Ughh! 

</exceprt>




__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. 
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/?.refer=text