For you IT/IP shysters
- Thread starter UncleMark
- Start date
I haven't messed with Linux a lot.... is that the one you recommend? What browsers work on it? Do they work well?
Twas the Internet that ruined it. Technet was the playground of IT types and it was awesome. Want to run a rack of servers in your house with Exchange at home? Technet. Later people starting posting about it on forums and whatnot and joe user started taking advantage. Microsoft pulled the plug around 2013.
I've been using desktop Linux as my personal OS for over ten years now, and spent two or three years before that dual booting before I just gave up on Windows altogether.
Linux Mint is considered the best Linux for newbies, and I have always installed it with the KDE DTE for my converts. Unfortunately, the Mint developers have decided to discontinue support for KDE, and are concentrating on their gtk based offerings -- Cinnamon, Mate, and Xfce. Of those three, I think it's a tossup between Cinnamon and Mate as far as ease-of-use is concerned.
All browsers except Internet Explorer will work with Mint. Firefox is the default, but you can add a dozen more if you like.
If you've got a spare machine laying around, take the plunge. If you've got some tech chops -- but aren't hard wired to the MSFT "way" -- you should be able to hit the ground running.
That's all cloud based on Google's servers. You'd be better off using Linux and Libre Office.
That said, we've had good luck with Google Apps hosting our email.
Again, not sure how many times I need to repeat this, but he made 28,000 unauthorized copies. That’s copyright infringement. Period. End of story. Doesn’t even matter that he never distributed them.
You may be right about that (based upon my reading of the EULA, I think you are), but it's still highly relevant that he wasn't selling licenses. His product was only useful for people who wanted to reload and use an OS they already had a valid license for.
Again, not for the issue of whether or not it was legal, but this should have been extremely important for sentencing. The idea of going to prison for this is fundamentally ridiculous.
Depends on who you are and what you want to do. I've messed with various Linux distros for years but never settled on one as a primary desktop environment, though I do run some single use appliances. I find it too limiting. There's always something I need to use that just isn't going to work. I have 15 years of Quicken data and use it every day. I'm not switching to some open source knockoff that does a fraction of what I want. Oh sure, there's always a convoluted workaround. But years in IT have taught me that any instructions that start with, "All you have to do is..." is a non-starter with the average user.
Part of the problem with Linux is that it's non-intuitive and Linux types seem to relish their role as people who know things that you don't. We used to joke about "The Linux Test." That is, if you have to ask a question about it, you're obviously too stupid to use it.
Generally speaking, if you're hard wired into the "Windows way" then it might be non-intuitive, to you. The folks that have the best success in making the transition are the teachable users. The self proclaimed "power users" and "system administrators" can't abide having their hard won Windows based knowledge being of no use to them.
Unix users are the Libertarians of the computer world.
LOL. Yeah, there are some hard core folks at the end of the spectrum (Stallman being the end point). Most take a much more pragmatic/practical view. Even Debian is getting a less ideological when it comes to what it considers "free", or at least is willing to make some "non-free" packages available to its users through its infrastructure.
But the point is, any system that requires "chops" (your term) is a non-starter for 99% of the user base. Which makes it useless for enterprise other than special use back end systems. (And we do have many of those.) You question why enterprise seems beholden to Microsoft, well that's why. Open Source may be nirvana to you (and maybe me in private) but companies can't run that way. A company full of Linux desktops would be a support nightmare that would cost far more than confiscatory Microsoft licensing. Not to mention that the vast majority of standard applications won't run on it without some sort of convoluted "all ya gotta do is..." nonsense.
Linux is a niche for gearheads and special use platforms. The very thing that appeals to you is what keeps it from being viable. So long as it's a Wild West OS it'll never be suitable for mainstream business environment.
The only "chops" needed are to get the OS installed and set up for the user. NPT wouldn't need any if he had me do that for him. In my experience, when I do that (and I've done it a number of times), the user just sits down and starts using it. It really is quite intuitive to an unsophisticated user who simply needs to navigate a menu and point and click. It would be a non-starter for 99% of the user base if the user had to install and set up his system with MSFT software too.
In my small little company I'm the unofficial/defacto techie. There are a handful of users who don't need to use the ERP or any other proprietary applications and they're running desktop Linux. I never hear from them. The Windows users are another story.
