Well….could I ? Dump my Wintel laptop and MS office, get linux, staroffice, dump Dreamweaver and Visual Studio and stick to just Eclipse and the command prompt? and still do my daily work+play+blog+etc ?
We love to talk open source, linux, openoffice,etc and how cool it is, and how everyone but US should be using it.But really, we DON’T ever think of using it ourselves, or in our companies. We dump everything and run to MS office at the first sign of trouble, while say, opening an excel file or making a chart.
but could you, as a daily user live on just open source tools? Do you really need microsoft? Or will a firefox browser on linux, running Google docs, gmail, facebook and wordpress do just fine? Its almost a religious conversion. I still don’t think I could. I still believe in a mix of technologies. I know very few techies in Pakistan who actually walk the walk and talk the talk, so to speak. If I get may be enough people asking me through the comments stream (who cares about this anyway, so dont ask 
), maybe I’ll take up the challenge.
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March 31st, 2008 at 7:43 pm
I think its possible specially on Ubuntu. I’ve been trying since long to make a switch but would always fall back. This time I installed the latest version of Ubuntu and honestly its pretty good. Most of the time my files are opening and its just running everything.
As far as the windows part is concerned, I installed VirtualBox and I’m pretty impressed by its performance. The thing is I’m interacting with people who are windows users so I do need Office because if I’ve to give them a word file there is no other choice but to use office.
But the only application which I’ve installed in my VirtualBox is office other than that everything else is working on Ubuntu.
Mind it the dependence is on the applications that have been written for Windows, the dependence is not on Windows.
check this out:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/macworld/20080327/tc_macworld/studyseesmicrosoftbrandinsharpdecline;_ylt=A0WTcXYUUuxHKXsBXQQjtBAF
March 31st, 2008 at 7:45 pm
good luck..
its hard.
ive survived about 3 months but occasionally turned on the XP VM on top of Ubuntu for those VERY annoying things that just dont seem to work on ubuntu. Try Picasa editing. Not as much fun on Linux.
Anyways., good luck
April 1st, 2008 at 2:41 am
I know a person who has been sleeping eating and drinking this open source stuff for more than 4 years
April 1st, 2008 at 2:58 am
Apart from linux I think I’ll switch to Mac very soon, it gives you the power of a unix box and it just works
No other OS is as user friendly as Mac is.
April 1st, 2008 at 5:31 am
Yeah Ive really been seriously considering a move to the Mac platform… esp since using an iPod touch on a daily basis.
April 3rd, 2008 at 2:21 am
Have been on Ubuntu for almost 4 months now. The only thing I need Windows for is some MS Office 2007 forms that have been created internally and the controls don’t run on anything else.
Besides that its all been linux
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:40 pm
go for MAC, that can be the only replacement for the people like us who are used to GUIs + are the power users or try a Hackintosh solution.
April 8th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
For me, the only concern is development environment ….
April 11th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
for a solid dev environment i’d use linux. but then that pc would be used for nothing else but dev..
April 15th, 2008 at 4:14 am
Being an above average power user, jumping into a myriad of activities on my modest laptop, ranging from using ERP frontend interfaces (which incidently is my profession as well) to retouching .PSD (Photoshop)/ . RAW Digital Camera files and to re-encoding my digital media on .xH264 /AC3 codec (Very machine consuming), my vote still would go for Windows which brings in a variety of applications with unmatched ease of use. With everything made in China yet dependable, the hardware prices are on a lowering spell all the time, one can easily upgrade a laptop/desktop to decent levels of strength in terms of Video/Audio/Memory/Speed/Storage.
I still have the multi-boot option to have a peek in Ubuntu (which I keep updating every 6 months release cycle) whenever i have the itch, however none of my object(ive) oriented tasks are born in GUNIX (Graphical Unix any Flavour Ubuntu/Fedora/SuSE).
So i would stick with Windows XP as my primary bed also when its serves my bread and butter as well and yeah for entertainment as well. Just yesterday I was looking for a software based DLNA server for my digital entertainment setup. To stream from my media library in the attached NAS to the LCD / Sound System. After trying without success in mediaTomb (Ubuntu based) i ultimately switched over to TVersity (Windows based) which made everything go perfect.
We just cannot ignore the fact that a very important factor in selecting an OS platform is the range of activities to be done within that environment. From the above posts what I extract (I maybe wrong) is that the computer is used primarily in isolation (for development / general usage). We should give due importance to the fact that more and more other devices which interact with the computer on a regular basis (at least I have External NAS / Network Media Streamer / USB Smart Card Reader / Bluetooth / Digital Camera / Movie Camera / Cell Phones just to name a few ..) have native support for Windows Platform for full range of features, with very little/untested/beta/experimental support for Linux and its cousins.
June 17th, 2008 at 12:44 am
I’ve used Linux or FreeBSD as my primary desktop at home and work for over a decade now. The only non-free application I’d have trouble giving up is Adobe Flash, and that’s primarily because of websites that use it, not because any of my software relies on it.