The Linux Desktop has been around for some time now, but yet has not taken the desktop world by storm. People still perceive it to be suitable for a techie person and not for the common man. That is actually not true any more. I have been using Linux desktop in form of OpenSuSE for more than 3 years now with no major glitches. To be honest, I won't call myself too techie, yet, the Linux Desktop is easy to install, configure and use. As easy as the Windows Desktop.
However, one thing that I found most of the people switch back to windows desktop is for want of Microsoft Project, Outlook email client and MS Office. Some people install a Windows desktop as a guest OS on a Linux host using VMWare, XEN or VirtualBox, but many of them switch back to Windows as that is an easy route. For such users, I do have the following recommendations
a. MS Project : Indeed I needed one for my day to day project tracking. I use OpenProj http://sourceforge.net/projects/openproj. Using OpenProj, you can import an mpp and after that you don't need MS Project at all. It has got almost all the features that any project manager uses in MS Project.
b. MS Office : The best alternative is LibreOffice - http://www.libreoffice.org/. Its free. It has document writer, spreadsheet (like excel) and presentation (like powerpoint). 99% of MS Office users just use the basic features and very very very few use the advanced features. In my opinion, its criminal waste. Switch to LibreOffice and you can do everything simple that you have been doing with MSOffice.
Still, there are quite a few excel programmers who use macros heavily. A friend of mine is brilliant in excel macro programming. He does everything using excel using simple VBScripts. I am not sure if all of them would work flawlessly in LibreOffice.
One alternative is to try running MSOffice on a Linux Desktop!
Wine (Windows Emulator) can be used to do this. I could successfully install and run MSOffice 2007 on my OpenSuSE 11.4 desktop. See the below (my Linux desktop screen shot)
The same way using wine, you can install and run Outlook too.
Linux is stable, secure, powerful, reliable, free, highly customizable and yet simple to use. I have no reason to switch over to an expensive windows desktop.
However, one thing that I found most of the people switch back to windows desktop is for want of Microsoft Project, Outlook email client and MS Office. Some people install a Windows desktop as a guest OS on a Linux host using VMWare, XEN or VirtualBox, but many of them switch back to Windows as that is an easy route. For such users, I do have the following recommendations
a. MS Project : Indeed I needed one for my day to day project tracking. I use OpenProj http://sourceforge.net/projects/openproj. Using OpenProj, you can import an mpp and after that you don't need MS Project at all. It has got almost all the features that any project manager uses in MS Project.
b. MS Office : The best alternative is LibreOffice - http://www.libreoffice.org/. Its free. It has document writer, spreadsheet (like excel) and presentation (like powerpoint). 99% of MS Office users just use the basic features and very very very few use the advanced features. In my opinion, its criminal waste. Switch to LibreOffice and you can do everything simple that you have been doing with MSOffice.
Still, there are quite a few excel programmers who use macros heavily. A friend of mine is brilliant in excel macro programming. He does everything using excel using simple VBScripts. I am not sure if all of them would work flawlessly in LibreOffice.
One alternative is to try running MSOffice on a Linux Desktop!
Wine (Windows Emulator) can be used to do this. I could successfully install and run MSOffice 2007 on my OpenSuSE 11.4 desktop. See the below (my Linux desktop screen shot)
Linux is stable, secure, powerful, reliable, free, highly customizable and yet simple to use. I have no reason to switch over to an expensive windows desktop.
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