RE: StarOffice - hopefully the final rant.

["Ryberg, Nicholas" <nryberg@uspsoig.gov>]

Forgive me, Brent, but I'm cutting out our conversation altogether - not out
of censorship, but consideration for those who don't have the time/bandwidth
to deal with long, un-necessarily quoted emails.  Also, my intent is to put
this issue to bed, which I'm sure most of you already have.  

You have caught the majority of the errors in my logic and argument.  I have
to confess that I got ticked because of the general statement "No I have a
dual p3 500 at work and NT still isn't tolerable." from Jon Schewe.  I
interpreted this to mean that the performance was poor, rather than perhaps
other issues affecting Jon's opinion.  I was, quite frankly, astounded by
the statement.  Enough of that.

As far as comparing apples to apples (or Apples to IBMs in the old days), I
think that from a user's point of view, it doesn't really matter what the
O/S is... as long as it performs invisibly without crashing.  I grant that
the installation programs provided by Red Hat, Caldera and other distros are
VERY user friendly, but it still takes a technically experienced person to
fix problems like LAN connectivity.  The user interfaces provided by KDE,
Gnome, et al, are wonderful!  I've used the first two, and realized how far
MS Win has to go... However, and here's the kicker, there's not a really
solid reason for a common user to switch over to Linux from MS other than
Linux is A) neat, or B) an alternative to MS. MS is expensive, takes up way,
way too much space on the hard drive, BUT it works.

Although I certainly accept the point raised by you and others that you
wouldn't even consider downloading NT like you would a distro, I think my
point is still valid in the other direction.  It's far easier to go to
Compusa and buy the Red Hat distro (or go to the TCLUG install fests) than
to sit and wait for a fairly large, current distro come trickling down a
phone line.  How many requests have I seen on this discussion list for local
copies of current packages?

Finally, I realize that my biggest mistake is preaching to the choir of a
different religion, to mangle a metaphor.  I would guess that the general
computer, programming and O/S expertise of all of you is considerably deeper
than the average schmo using Word and Excel.  It's not a problem for you to
recompile the kernel.  Personally, I wouldn't know what the hell I was
doing!  I would more than likely render Linux unusable.

So, more power to you, but when it comes to actually getting work done, I
have to rely on MS. 

- Nick