My principal business is a restaurant <http://pizzapizza.vze.com/> and I've been running Linux Mandrake on our office computer since 8.0. The system is more stable and our data is no longer hostage to Microsoft's proprietary formats.
One of the reasons that made me look at alternatives to Windows in the first place is that I use the office computer to supply background music for the dining area, but under Windows the system was never stable enough to rely upon. With any player under Windows -- Winamp, Music Match, whatever -- the sound would stutter and crash after a few hours. With Linux Mandrake and XMMS, I don't even have to think about the music anymore. I just turn on the system and it plays, with perfect reliability. The heart of our restaurant's office work is a spreadsheet with a list of raw ingredients that my restaurant uses. It is referenced by another sheet that has all our recipes and calculates costs and prices. It in turn is referenced by a word processing document that has our menu ready to print. Microsoft Office could never get it right: cell references were dropped, formatting was mangled, and files were irrecoverably corrupted constantly. OpenOffice imported the relevant files, converted them, and made everything work out of the box. As a side business I develop and manage web sites. The software available in Linux is so much better than the equivalent apps in Windows. Bluefish, Gimp, gFTP... they blow away the best there is for Windows. I'll never go back to Microsoft. I had opened our town's first Internet café. I have since closed it for business reasons, but at the same time I switched our restaurant to Linux I switched the café as well, renaming it the Tropical Penguin Cybercafé with a logo of Tux wearing a Hawaiian necklace. Steady customers didn't notice that it wasn't Windows but did comment on how much faster and more stable the workstations had become, and how much nicer the desktops looked. -- Warren Post, Registered Linux user 241394 Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras http://srcopan.vze.com/
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