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Login/Become a Member! | 9 Comments
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Re: Part III: Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth
(Score: 1)
by comforteagle on Feb 23, 2005 - 10:09 AM
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"Your making the gross assumption that someone would come along and replace an existing, licensed, working, OS with Linux."
Yes, he is: "Recall, the scenario is that you are changing hardware anyway, since changing operating systems on in-situ desktops is a high cost operation even if it is license free, even if it were Windows to Windows. To keep the analysis simple, we get to do this at hardware change."
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Re: Part III: Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth
(Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Feb 24, 2005 - 01:27 AM
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If you leave one user (a 35,000 dollar a year asset turned liability) unable to perform thier work as part of a mass migration then you blew it. If your a huge shop the way you describe, hire one OpenSource Kid, have him order white boxes that he can load various linux flavors on, pick the one that gives you the most of your "must-have" apps, and abilities, then make one or two of these machines available to each dept/manager/division, for no procurement cost, have IT eat it. The machine will make it into the cubes, I am sure of it. Follow up the machines as they get deployed, let thier be a buzz about them. After at least a few months interview the users and find out what they are and are not using them for. Have your OpenSource Kid work with IT and actively work on the net for finding solutions to your "must-haves" that don't have simple solutions. This project isn't gonna break the bank in any respect. If it works out then your a hero, if its not getting any traction then axe it in the next round of budget cuts. Face it, you have a lot of dumber more expensive experiments gone wrong laying around and being legacy supported in any corp of any great size with much computing history.
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Re: Part III: Corporate Desktop Linux - The Hard Truth
(Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Feb 24, 2005 - 11:26 AM
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This is a fantastic article and I wish it was written 2.5 years ago.
Everything this man is saying is true, and I didn't take any of these variables into consideration before our Linux desktop pilot. I almost had people with pitch forks and torches standing at my office. One woman was in tears when Word , using Wine, quit for the 5th time in one day. We tried to using Codeweavers 1.0 product to pilot 12 Linux desktops, but it was a disaster because of the threading problem with Wine. Opening more than 1 Windows app resulted in a crash and a lot of lost work. Fortunately, I work for a very large and entreprenurial advertising agency in Chicago and they let this incident go, but I burned a @#$@#! load of credibility. Even after I have showed them the fixes, they still don't want to touch it again.
Even now, with Open Office 2.0 there is still a lot of adjusting of Word/Powerpoint/Excel docs even if you load the TTF fonts, Codeweavers 4.1 product is 10x better, but still has a way to go. Even getting to Samba shares was a pain in the ass sine you needed to be root at the time.
The only way to really transition off of Windows is run Windows using Win4Lin to run the few apps that you need. Linux on the desktop will happen but this article should be used as a bible until things are easier.
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