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On 15/02/14 11:20, Simon Avery wrote: > On 14 February 2014 20:31, bad apple <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx > <mailto:mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx>> wrote: > > > The change to any Linux distribution is vastly more of a change, with > users requiring at least some initial instruction. > > > Do you really think that? > > My real-world sample suggests not - at least for non-technical users. > > Rob has migrated several of our users, who are non-technical, across to > Mint successfully. I've not heard of any complaints or dissatisfaction > from those users, but I wouldn't really expect to. The cinnamon layout > is intuitive, the same tools as they are trained to use on Windows > (Firefox, Thunderbird) are there and behave exactly the same and the > hardware is more responsive. (Even if all things were equal, not having > AV scanning every file access is a considerable uplift). > > The "initial instruction" is pretty much negligable, as long as they can > see the firefox and thunderbird icons on the desktop. They don't even > need to go into the menus or taskbar at all, although if they did, the > various file navigators are not a million miles away from Explorer with > familiar "My Files" or "Documents" folders. > > For us being a charity, the licence fees for Windows, Office and AV (The > only non-free software on every windows machine) are not huge and not > the main motivator for this, but this switch has allowed us an extra > year or two out of old single-cored hardware for occasional and > light-use users. > > There are some drawbacks, of course. Not being able to run the same > software (Sage and some graphics packages being the main ones for us), > and supporting two platforms takes more work and requires admins to have > multiple skillsets and tools, but I really wouldn't class users as being > the main problem in switching to linux in an office environment. Sorry Simon, but whilst I'm in rant mode I'm having a go at this too. Yes, for god's sake, of course I think that. I don't only think that, I know it from extensive experience. I can't believe there is even a question about it, this is ridiculous. Take a lifetime office worker, who has spent all their working life on Windows 2000, XP, Vista. Which OS do you really think is going to be easier for them to adapt to - Win8 without Metro, or any Linux system? If you say Linux, I will be very cross because it's f**king obviously not the case. Sans Metro, Win8 is the *very damn same* system they've always used, functionally identical to the boring Windows GUI they've used for a decade or two. You could drag someone out of the nineties who's only used Win95 or Win98, put them in front of a de-Metroed Win8 machine and they'd instantly be at home. Or you could stick them in front of a Mint or Ubuntu machine. Which they won't understand and will hate you for. And that's before they even get started on the clusterf*ck that is LibreOffice instead of MS Office, or wonder why SharePoint no longer works or Visio won't run... All of you claiming that for normal corporate users of Windows are better off or would be more productive moving to Linux are quite frankly delusional. You do realise that I have to deal with this stuff almost daily right? I'm not pulling this out of my arse, I contend with issues like this all the time: I actually have to train the users we move from crappy old XP workstations to Debian or CentOS or whatever. I like Linux a lot. I vastly prefer it to any Microsoft OS. But I have a very large "real world sample" to work from as well and I highly suspect it's a lot bigger than most of yours. Also my users aren't morons - they don't have to be simply pointed at the Firefox and Thunderbird icons on the desktop, that's frankly insulting to them. They have a great deal more responsibility than that and whilst they might not be particularly skilled in IT, they have important tasks to complete with their computers. Computers that I am paid to ensure work as well as possible, which is why I don't unnecessarily mess with them. Lifetime corporate Windows users will always be more productive and happiest using the systems they've always used, i.e., Windows. This isn't even up for discussion, it's just a fact. Sure, some of them might have no problem transitioning to Mint or whatever, and good for them. But when that first business-critical VB macro fails to run, or Samba can't connect to the DC because of a kerberos library mismatch, or one of any little Windows/Linux integration issue raises it's ugly head for the first time then money is lost, productivity goes down, and the boss gets very angry and goes looking for the idiot in IT who thought rolling out Ubuntu to the finance department was a good idea. I'm not that idiot, and I sincerely hope none of you are either, although I'm beginning to have my doubts. Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq