Dotan Cohen wrote:
2008/6/10 ccornell - OpenOffice.org <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Serious question: what is so good about Windows XP that it is worth
petitioning for?
I have used Windows XP in the past, and found it a very frustrating
and insecure operating system. What features does Windows XP have that
users feel are missing from other OS's?
This is not a troll, but a serious question.
This is my observations... just observations, not based on "facts"...
Many many people are dissatisfied with Vista. It failed to live up to hopes
and hype. It will not run well on anything but the latest hardware. People
dislke the rather silly security features of Vista. People are happy with XP
as it is.
Security is generally of little concern to the vast majority of users that I
talk to - the concern for security is usually found amongst those who are
more computer savvy, and those users already know how to either lock down
Windows XP or use an alternative such as Linux.
Windows XP has familiarity. It has been the "only" OS available for a long
long time (8 years is a whole generation of users who only know one OS), and
this has got people used to one way of working... change is not easy, and
Vista or any other OS such as Linux means change. (I say only because when
in the last 20 years have you gone into a consumer electronics store or a
dedicated home computer shop and found anything but some version of
Windows?)
Windows XP has a massive stock of commercial applications that work with it.
Vista cannot lay the same claim as many legacy applications work poorly or
even not at all (look at the large number of people asking for a version of
OpenOffice.org that works in Vista... they've been burnt before by Vista and
now they ask first).
People are not aware that there are other excellent choices such as OSX,
Linux, OpenSolaris, etc etc.
The list goes on and on.
C.
I see. This is how I summerize:
1) Dissatisfaction with the successor of XP
2) Unfamiliarity with anything else
3) Inability of legacy programs to run on other OSes (including the
successor to XP)
I understand then that there is no 'killer feature' in Windows XP that
people need other than the ability to run legacy software. I thought
that maybe the OS itself had some feature that was desirable. Thanks.
It is indeed mostly the existence of specialized programs that run only
under Windows or only under Macintosh that provide services that aren’t
available under Linux.
For example, in the business in which I work we must be able to handle
documents created in Adobe In-Design or in Quark Express.
Converting to another format would not be good enough, unless we do the
conversion and then can manually fix up any changes that occurred. We
must be able to handle any ligatures and alternate glyphs that occur in
files produced by those products. Currently Scribus is far from being
good enough.
We must have Canadian address correction software. There are various
suppliers of this kind of product under Windows. I don’t believe there
are any under either Macintosh or Linux. We would like mail-merge
software to drive our high-speed printers. This is specialized software.
We could use the mail merge in OpenOffice.org (or in MS Word) and have
used it for particular jobs, but it is far too slow to use all the time.
There are a large number of products that run under Windows that do mail
merge with high speed printers. I don’t know about Macintosh. I have not
been able to find ANY such products that run under Linux.
Our database work is mostly done using Microsoft Foxpro, which is a
wonderful application for quick and dirty fixes as well as for more
complex application work.
We have an accounting system and an inventory system that depends on
products that run under Windows.
We were using Windows 98 until about two years ago, when we switched to
Windows XP and were using FoxPro 6 until about four months back when we
switched to FoxPro 9.
I think you will find that most businesses have many of the same
problems when it comes to switching to Linux. They are dependent on
specialized software that is ONLY available under Windows and are
generally used to Windows. There are a smaller number of businesses that
would say the same about Macintoshes. Many of them do use specialized
“kiiller applications” for their particular business, that don't run
under Linux.
Also, a large number of free software products are just as available
under Windows as under Linux which means Windows users are not cut off
from much of the free software available under Linux.
It does not help the matter that a large number of Linux advocates seem
to be nutters who don’t have a clue about what is required in business,
or what features individuals may legitimately want, the sort of people
who, for example, since OpenOffice 1.0 were claiming, falsely, that
OpenOffice.org duplicates MS Office in every way.
Those people are still around, still making their claims, or claiming
instead that no-one needs bloated Word processors at all or that Ajax
online is a suitable replacement for MS Word.
One member of this forum still claims, falsely, that Windows doesn't
handle foreign languages properly and also, falsely, that this defect
affects OpenOffice. Another one delights in the silly name Mickysoft, as
though using that name indicates anything more than that the member is a
name-caller.
Unfortunately this nonsense reflects on all Linux advocates who may be
seen as clueless, name-calling nutters.
Just yesterday I corrected a name-caller in another forum who blamed
Microsoft for introducing the useless character “ÿ” into their character
set. The character is used in French names and was therefore
appropriately included in the ISO Latin 1 alaphabet by the ISO before
Microsoft adapted the set first into the DOS international character set
and then into the so-called ANSI Windows character set.
In another forum an ignoramus was claiming that certain modern spellings
were the fault of Microsoft who had made them popular in their
Spell-checker, as though Microcosft were not just using the spellings in
current dictionaries.
A member of this forum was blaming Microsoft for vandalizing UTF-8.
Bruce Byfield wrote an article attempting to prove that OpenOffice
Writer is equal to MS Word, but unfortunately a new feature of
OpenOffice Writer that he intended to be a killer feature has, unknown
to him, been available on Word for decades. Fair enough. Anyone can make
a mistake
But Bruce then starts justifying his embarrassing error claiming that
the Word feature was obscure because some Word advocates didn’t know
about it, as though that means it doesn't count or that almost all Word
users who used mail-merge didn’t know about it. I've equally seen Writer
advocates in agreement that something can't be done in Writer, when
indeed it can be done. Why didn’t Bruce just admit he had messed up?
There are the conspiracy nutters who seem ready to jump on Microsoft
because of the possiblity that Microsoft could set up their system to
disable competing products, especially OpenOffice. That people all over
the world are running OpenOffice quite happily under Windows with no
particular problems, and running it under Vista, doesn't stop this.
(That there are Windows nutters who are equally out-of-it and spouting
just as much untrue positive crap about Windows and derogatory crap
about Linux unfortunately doesn't seem to be noticed, except of course
by the smaller community of Linux users.)
Jim Allan
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