<div dir="ltr">Not to take the wind out of your sails, I would probably advise against switching to Linux for anyone who's not a Linux expert. While it took me some years to reach this conclusion, I now believe that Linux is not a viable choice for anyone who's not an advanced user. My reasons follow:<br>
1. Mainstream desktop environments (KDE, GNOME) have gotten slower and buggier over the years. As I bought faster hardware, KDE and GNOME seemed slower and crashed more often. <br> 2. Linux distributions don't work. Even Ubuntu and other mainstream distributions simply do not work. Package testing is poor, and various programs do not integrate with one another. I often find myself having to fix things manually, usually by digging deep into various scripts/configuration files. Additionally, at least with Ubuntu, upgrades tend to break horribly, requiring a clean reinstallation.<br>
3. Usability as a whole is becoming less viable. Applications (at least with my recent Ubuntu distrubutions) tend to crash often, work more slowly and have less features.<br><br>Windows suffers from the same problems, only it's not as slow as Linux. On the other hand, I've been using OS X lately, and the thing works. The UI is simple, relatively powerful and does not randomly crash. I'm guessing OS X is not a valid choice for you, due to the prohibitive cost of Mac hardware.<br>
<br>Anyway, that's what I think.<br><br>Good luck, though.<br><br>Yotam Rubin<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/2/28 David Harel <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:hareldvd@gmail.com">hareldvd@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;">Greetings,</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;">I need your help
regarding convincing the vice president of an association to shift from
MS XP to Linux. What I did till now was install Ubuntu on two machines
that were phasing out and failed to run MS. We got all services we
needed including connectivity to external resources.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;">Currently the objection
to my initiation is in three items:</p>
<ol>
<li>Make Linux connect to IPVPN (thought it is straight forward).<br>
</li>
<li>Maintenance cost.</li>
<li>Getting his approval for my test (seems like a small man).</li>
</ol>
I need information to try to overturn his stubbornness.<br>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0pt;"><br>
</p>
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Regards.
David Harel,
==================================
Home office +972 77 7657645
Cellular: +972 54 4534502
Snail Mail: Amuka
D.N Merom Hagalil
13802
Israel
Email: <a href="mailto:hareldvd@ergolight-sw.com" target="_blank">hareldvd@ergolight-sw.com</a>
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