Microsoft Free, One Year Later

Trolas 06-05-2008

In May of 2007 I wrote a post called Open Source and Microsoft Free. Little did I know that this post would show up on Digg, Slashdot, Craigslist, and several other popular web sites and become a platform for both the Linux and Microsoft camps to wage yet another flame war.

This whole "Microsoft free" experiment started when a colleague of mine challenged me to eat my own dog food after reading many of my posts about my dabbling with open source technologies. The next day, after a few blue screens of death and various issues with Outlook, I grabbed a Ubuntu CD and installed it on my laptop...at work! From that day forward, I have not used a single Microsoft product at work. It has been one year now and I have survived with Thunderbird and Evolution, Open Office, Firefox, and many other open source replacements for Microsoft products.

I put "Microsoft free" in quotes because there are a few exceptions. First, I did install IE 6.0 under wine for that rare occasion that I stumble across a website that only works on IE. Second, there is no answer for Visio. Most of the Visio diagrams that I needed to read were embedded in design documents in Word which I can read with Open Office Writer. But for those that I needed Visio for, I opened them at home on my XP box (I have 1 XP, 1 Vista, and 5 Linux boxes at home). I also used Visio at home when I had to create Visio diagrams. The issue is Visio's proprietary format is not available for developers to write a translation utility for.

With those two issues aside, which represents about 1% of my overall usage on my laptop, my Open Source experience was nearly flawless. Open Office worked remarkably well both receiving Microsoft Office files and creating files in Office format. I exchanged literally thousands of documents between Microsoft Office and Open Office. I never encountered a single issue with Word and Excel and occasionally encountered minor formatting issues with Power Point files. The formatting issues where nothing more then some minor placement issues which probably occurred less then 5% of the time.

Over the course of the year I experimented with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Freespire, Mepis, and PCLinuxOS. I settled on Kubuntu and recently upgraded with ease to the latest version, Hardy Heron. Here is my analysis of the different Linux distros from last fall. With this "Microsoft free" laptop I have coexisted with 1000+ employees who use XP and various verions of Office including 2007 (the 2007 compatibility add-on works fine). I also delivered presentations at conferences using Open Office Impress and traveled across the country and internationally with no issues with wireless connectivity.

I am not in any camps. I use XP and Linux at home and like both. I gave Outlook the boot years ago at home and do just fine with Thunderbird. It has every feature I need. I do however have problems with Vista. But my message here is not about recommending what tools that my readers should use. My message is that I performed at a high level at work while using Linux, Open Office, and other open source products. These tools did not hinder my ability to do my job and did not impact anyone else at my job. I was able to productively coexist with no Microsoft tools in a Microsoft shop. That is all I am trying to say.

I am not going to recommend to anybody that they change their company standards away from Microsoft. What I will tell you is that open source is a viable alternative that can be used in a production environment. So when you see flame wars where the two camps argue back and forth about their favorite technology, you can point to this post when people claim that Linux and Open Office just won't work in the work place. I have validated that they do work for over 365 days now. Whether we should use these tools at work is a whole different story that really depends on factors like corporate culture, skill sets, budgets, user base, executive support, and many others.

All I can say is that for the last year, I have been using Open Source exclusively and I am loving it!

orange

i haven't used Ubuntu in some time now (edgy eft was the last distro i used).. i only have one PC and its mostly used for games..

my only BIG issue with linux is sound. quite frankly, its poo..
other than that it runs perfectly and unlike an M$ box you can leave the bastard running (non-stop) for 2 years w/o any slowdown. as opposed to 2-months if you're lucky (why do you think 90% of servers run linux?)
also fragmentation doesn't seem to be an issue with the file-system used, so it loads almost everything instantly... i've been able to run 3-times as many programs at the same time also :\ with 4 different work-spaces on the one machine (thats where the "cube" comes into play)

still.. XP is what i use because of the much higher sound quality and also all the games i can play (i'm a gamer and audiophile, who would have thought). and everything is just easier to install and run, with little to no issues.


so yes i'm a fence sitter, but only begrudgingly suffer XP for where it DOES work, and support linux while i wish it would improve just a BIT MORE.

vista can bite my ass tho. i've left more amazing stuff in the can and i quite happily (and rapidly) FLUSHED IT!

hugo281

yeah I'm with you Oranage, I tried Vista at one point and I didn't like the performance and all that B.S. upgrading I had to do just to make it work right, I mean the graphics were good but when I installed programs like Office or a Dj mixer program it would just shut off on me which was annoying at times, and plus it would always freeze on me so I just went back to XP and I never had those problems ever since, and as for Linux well yeah sound was a problem for me too but the games whoo-hoo!! I like playing games on Linux lol, and using it at school as a server for Call of Duty in the computer lab, hehehe 30 computers 30 players aww man hehehehe good times baby!!! good times!!! lol

Hsoolien

Short of vista having an SP2 Epiphany (you know how XP went from bearable to solid with SP2), I'll never install it. However Linux might be a real future possibility as the new Unreal Editing tools are supposed to be ported cross platform, if they are not, then I'm stuck with Windows for that at minimum (the Unreal tools won't work in Wine, or didn't at last check)

hugo281

well I don't know about everyone but I did check out Wine and yeah you right for thing so pretty much I'm just sticking with XP for now.

orange

if he has it, or can get his hands on it. i'll ask my buddy to try it out...

infact i'll have a dedicated Linux drive by monday myself

any particular build of the Unread Editor, and any recommended spec's i should know before he or i attempt it?

orange added 1 Minutes and 9 Seconds later...:Update:

oh and why do i have a feeling the Unreal Editing software likely isn't free...
i might have to work something out with that :\

Hsoolien

Actually Unreal Editing software is 100% free, they even include a free personal edition of Maya with 2004 (and maybe 2003)

There are three key apps, UCC (which there is a Linux version of but it does not support all the compiling commands), UnrealEditor (in the system menu of Win installs) and UDE (Unreal Development Enviroment) which is a free DL off their site.

orange

ah ok.. so the Linux version of UCC has some missing compile commands that the windows version does have? or in general UCC is missing some compiling commands?


i should have linux up and running tomorrow so i'll do it early on in the event i fuck the whole thing up and need to format hah!

Hsoolien

The linux version is just missing commands

Joi

I think this would be a very difficult thing to do. Especialy for like business. Most people never even seen anything that wasn't windows on a computer.

Hsoolien

Business is the easiest to get away with a pure linux/open source install, they have done a very good job of making sure there are equivalent apps for everything business you need and they even mostly work the same or better. Also system admins would have far more control over their network, the ability to prevent app install they don't want and a severe minimized risk of viruses or other internet based attacks

Nina

Don't think I can agree with Hsool on 2 reason. Example of when companies tried to go from XP to vista. Alot of companies couldn't do that. Linux may face that same problem. The second reason is that too many workers can barely work windows. I don't know how many times I have to explain to people how to cut and paste without a mouse. I can't imagine going through explaining over and over again for something more complicated on linux.

hugo281

Yup I know how frustrating that can be Nina, I do that a couple of times at my job because half or more of the people here can't even do a copy n paste without the mouse but just keep it simple for now sticking with XP would reduce the flow of problems that Vista would bring with upgrades among other stuff

orange

i just reinstalled XP... linux off-the-bat is SO MUCH easier to use... just wanted to state that very obvious and simple FACT...

i have to try find MS Office now...hope it has the product-key... if this was linux, OpenOffice is a click away (if they dont already bundle it with the OS these days)...



how can people not know how to use the copy/paste hotkeys... all these non-tech-savvy Mac users even know how to use hotkeys!

seriously, if an admin sets up linux right, the copy/paste hotkey will be their BIGGEST problem :\

hugo281

true that Orange but hey maybe there's a way around that so problems like that won't be a factor especialy in a MAC