I don't intend to be philosophical in raising that question. I got the idea of asking that question after reading some articles in Linux Magazine about how Linux solutions can also have myths--and can be very frustrating for desktop users like me and the many PC users on the planet.
Since we talk about philosophy, Socrates was famous for saying "know thyself" or "the unexamined life is not worth it"--for linux failing to see linux beyond the many "technical" blabber in this mailing list or beyond the flame wars that are happening--we may never know where we are going. Personally, after many sleepless nights looking for solutions just to make my soundcard work, or wifi device to work--I am aksing myself is it worth it? Using OpenOffice alongside MS Office users is a nightmare. Powerpoint presentations from my co-workers or Word documents especially the ones with tables are all in disarray opening it in OpenOffice. One time, I was even reprimanded by the boss why I am in Linux after I submitted a presentation material made in openoffice but was completely unusable (texts and drawing are not in their proper places) during the time of the presentation. Damn it, I completely trusted OpenOffice Impress to just smoothly convert to .ppt and did not bother to check if its ok for the file to be opened in powerpoint.
Am i more productive in Linux than using MS Windows XP? I asked.
Flame wars, it really sometimes annoying but it is in flamewars that we get feedback from Linux users. It is through rants and complaints that Linux and other FOSS shape up
Below are two articles from a magazine solely for Linux and from a person with years of Linux in his mouth.
I have expected some more factual information from the views of Filipino Linux users like how these articles view Linux. But instead of getting these, i was dismissed as irrelevant and should stay in the "plug-misc" maling list. Again, if this mailing list is technical in nature, I apologize for the error. I do understand the limited resources we have Linux and spending bandwidth for these "intellectual masturbation" is really a waste of resources and time especially for a maling list intended for geeky and technical blobber. Months after I have been a member of this list most of the entries and subjects are coming from sysadmins, developers, programmers--few are coming from desktop users. I sometimes I get the impression that linux is not ready for the desktop user all the more for people who are not into programming, sysadministration and the like.
Thanks though for the replies.
End of the thread
| A Mile in IT's Shoes |
|
|
| Shutdown | |
| Written by Jason Perlow | |
|
Friday, 15 April 2005 |
|
|
Sometimes
I have to wonder whether the people working on key open source projects
really understand the end-user. While Linux has made some great strides
interoperating with Windows and Windows applications, the more I use Linux
as a desktop operating system in real corporate environments, the more
I realize we've got a long way to go before anyone — and I mean anyone
and everyone — can take a ride on the Magic Linux Bus. Until
recently, I never really realized just how many little things are
critical for user acceptance in large organizations, the first place
where Linux is likely to make its first big desktop wins. But now, as I
work on a Linux desktop pilot project for a large institutional client,
I'm finding that the little, minor annoyances typically and often
willfully ignored by die-hard Linux users are total deal breakers in
large end-user environments, even in departments like IT where "eating
your own dog food" is a time-honored tradition. Let's start with OpenOffice.org, the core of the Linux productivity desktop. Yes,
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a huge improvement over 1.x in terms of being able to import Microsoft Office files. But what about portability in the other
direction? Take in any foreign Office document of relative complexity in Word or Powerpoint format, make some minor changes, such as fixing a typo, do a "Save As" in native Microsoft Office
.DOC or .PPT,
and then just try opening that document in Office again and see what
happens. All the formatting gets completely munged to hell, because
OpenOffice completely destroys the metadata from the original document
and rewrites it in some half-baked least-common-denominator format that
tries to emulate Office 97. Don't believe me?
Go ahead and try it. Complex tables in Word get completely f* cked up
beyond all recognition (F.U.B.A.R.), images get moved around and
re-rasterized to the point where they look really crappy, and that's
just the tip of the iceberg. Powerpoint is a complete disaster. Got
some nice transitions or nifty animations in your presentation? Kiss
them goodbye. If you have to pass documents
back and forth with Windows users on a frequent basis, telling the
other side to switch to OpenOffice.org just won't cut it, particularly
if the other side is, say, oh, I dunno, the governor's office? Dammit, OpenOffice.org, do no harm! This is such a severe problem that my client ended up choosing
Office XP with a volume license of Codeweavers' Crossover Office Professional.
Believe me, it can get rather expensive to go that route if you start
talking hundreds of users. As it turns out, my client already had a Select
agreement with Microsoft, so it already ate the total cost of ownership
of Office XP long ago, but what about an organization that didn't? What
if the company's licenses were tied to specific machines or OEM
agreement and the company was using thin clients with LTSP
off a new server and needed all new client licenses for Microsoft
Office? That'd completely blow the "Linux is cheaper" argument to hell,
wouldn't it? And the headaches don't stop with OpenOffice.org. Active Directory integration is a huge hassle. Sure, Winbind
works — if you know what the hell you're doing and can commune for
several days with a nice O'Reilly book. Otherwise, there's no easy,
trouble-free way of setting up a Linux server or desktop as an Active
Directory client. Neither Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or SuSE 9.x has particularly good tools for correctly configuring Samba, Kerberos, PAM, and
NTP
with all of the right parameters and manual tweaks. I recently spent
about a week with some pretty smart people just getting a single server
to join an Active Directory domain and authenticate user logins
correctly. If we really expect enterprises to adopt Linux desktops, this crap has to be seamless and a no-brainer. Simple things, such as not having to constantly enter your user credentials in KDE every time you touch an AD-authenticated Windows share, or just being able to cache Samba passwords in a user profile, shouldn't be rocket science. Forced periodic network password resets (a common practice in IT environments) in Linux shouldn't require that users know how to use smbpasswd from the command line with the correct options. And mounting home directories on legacy Windows 2000 file and print servers during logon shoudn't require some convoluted half-baked shell script or wacky NFS/NIS or SAN-based workaround, either. It should just work. Interoperability's a bitch, ain't it? | |
Another article, about breaking the myth that deploying Linux in enterprises is "cheap" compared to propriety softwares.
| TCO Myths and Politics |
|
|
| Shutdown | |
| Written by Jason Perlow | |
| Friday, 15 July 2005 | |
|
A few months back, in my "Shutdown" column entitled "A Mile in IT's Shoes" (http://www.linux-mag.com/2005-03/shutdown_01.html ), I relayed the various technical challenges I was encountering while working on a pilot project to deploy a thin-client Linux desktop for a large, institutional customer. At the time, the pilot program was ongoing and the jury was still out. Now, I have some bad news: the pilot failed and the customer decided not to deploy a Linux solution. Why? While
the solution was sound and my customer liked what was delivered —
indeed, the IT director of the company and many of his staff praised
the solution for its innovativeness, its superior performance, and its
excellent stability — the killing blow was the myth of superior Linux
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and misconceptions about the ease of
migrating users. A lot of people are under the
impression that because Linux is a "free" operating system, it should
be cheaper to deploy than an equivalent Windows solution, with its pile
of add-on products such as Microsoft Office,
virus scanners, network client access licenses (CALs), and so on. But
as it turns out, after everything is said and done, in a large desktop
deployment, guess what? Linux costs the same! How can that be, you ask? Sure, if you use OpenOffice.org,
you don't incur an expenses for a desktop suite. And desktop licenses
of your average Linux distribution are, what, $100 apiece? And with
Linux desktops you don't need virus scanners or CALs. So, in theory,
those savings should be easy to realize, right? Well,
as it turns out, your PC hardware costs about the same. In large
organizations, the per-seat cost for Windows and Microsoft Office are
reduced because of the large volume Select
agreements. And in my customer's case, since OpenOffice.org was an
unsuitable choice due to file format issues, it would have cost an
extra $60 per user for Crossover Office to run Microsoft Office XP. Ka-ching! The discounted price for Windows was pretty much the same. And lest I forget — the
Active Directory integration software that was chosen, Centrify
(which I highly recommend if you need an identity management
consolidation product), would have run $50 per seat for full blown
desktops, or in the thin client configuration, $600 for the server and
$1,000 for the Windows-based management console software. Oh, and
access to Citrix applications? Yep, more licenses. And
then there was the issue of technical support. Novell, who admittedly
was excited about a potential testimonial customer, offered special
pricing for the pilot project: $40,000 for a special thin-client pilot
deployment for 100 seats, with a non-dedicated engineer and a central
call-in number usable during normal business hours. Now
a semi-dedicated, locally-based customer support engineer, who
typically would divide his time between my client and a half dozen other clients, would have cost $150,000 per year — an expense that was out of the question. And
all of this before hiring a regular, on-staff Linux desktop and server
support person to support the pilot. That salary would likely have been
$80,000 per year. Suddenly, a Linux solution is
starting to put a large dent in my client's wallet. And to top it all
off, there's the issue of company politics and the fear of the unknown.
Windows, for whatever it is, is a known quantity, and end-users and
their overworked IT support staff like it because it's familiar. People
who aren't familiar with Linux but who've heard great things about it
assume it can replace Windows, with a nearly identical feature set and
similar desktop experience. This is all fine and dandy, except that
when Linux behaves in a different way or something is implemented in a
different way, or the application feature set is not complete and
requires workarounds (like dealing with remotely-mounted home
directories on existing Windows servers), or if it's expected to
interoperate with a pre-existing Windows network and with other Windows
clients in a "seamless" and fully transparent manner. These are
precisely the areas where you can run into problems, because it's those
grey areas where Linux isn't completely polished yet. Although
its paradigm is arguably similar, a Linux desktop is not a Windows
desktop, and it requires a different management methodology with a new
learning curve. You can try to communicate this to potential end-users
as much as you'd like up front, but until they actually experience it
for themselves, they aren't going to fully understand it. Are
all Linux desktop deployments doomed in the same fashion? I think those
of us who expect to be able to shoehorn Linux desktops into an IT
environment and replace an entrenched Windows infrastructure are
probably a bit deluded. There are many areas where Linux still requires
a lot of work to integrate. But I still feel
there is a place for Linux on the corporate desktop, and arguably, with
more time and more polish, the issues I encountered will become moot. Don't worry. Jason Perlow is still keeping the faith. You can reach Jason at [EMAIL PROTECTED]. | |
--
Wilson John Barbon
Biology, Ecosystems and Philosophy
Danajon Bank, Bohol, Philippines
+63921-817-4593
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