Some Open Source advocates are serious when they suggest that Gnumeric is a valid Excel contender, or that the Gnome Desktop “is just as easy to use as the Windows Desktop”. These people suffer from their very own reality distortion field, as Larry Augustin, founder of VA Linux, points out:

I recall a discussion (not on this list) some time ago where a group of people were arguing that Gnumeric was a replacement for Excel. I was appalled. They were arguing about Excel vs. Gnumeric features. They were arguing about reading and writing Excel file formats. They didn’t understand why Excel users complained when they tried to use Gnumeric. The prevailing opinions were that users were just not willing to learn to use something different.

I finally asked the question, “Can Gnumeric do pivot tables?” I go the response, “What’s a pivot table?” My point was proven. The Gnumeric advocates didn’t even understand the technology they were trying to replace. I can hand an Office power user an Excel spreadsheet with 1000s of names and addresses, and with a few point and click operations, out come pages of stick-on mailing labels. How do you do that with Gnumeric? I’m willing to bet that few or none of us on this mailing list have that level of proficiency with MS Office or Excel. If we don’t know what it can do, and we don’t know what people do with it, how can we replace it?

2002-12-12: Arrgh. I now remember why I made the conscious decision in 2000 to no longer run Linux on the Desktop. It’s just a waste of time to get all the silly library dependencies to work. Decided to give it a try at the office over VNC, such as to not have to screw up my machine. Turns out I have to spend a day resolving install problems and other shit, not exactly what I consider relevant activities. I will gladly leave that field to slackers that want to feel leet. I will likely export my sources over samba so that I can work on them from Windows 2000 using Eclipse.
2008-01-03: Hopefully, 2008 is the year of online apps, instead. having spent a day to decrapify a XP machine this holiday, it was refreshing to see how much non-savvy users like some online apps.

I think that was it, though. Everything else “just worked,” including opening all their Microsoft Office documents — word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations — in OpenOffice.org, connecting to their wireless network (served by an Apple Airport Express, natch), and of course playing Mahjongg (part of gnome-games). I know the wireless thing isn’t a fair test, since I’d already thoroughly tested their hardware for Linux compatibility and had been running Debian on it for 18 months. Still — different Distro, clean install, no driver problems. Thanks, Canonical (and Debian, and all the upstream driver hackers). And thanks to Sun and others for reverse-engineering Microsoft’s proprietary formats and building a free office suite that even my mother could love. Kudos all around. 2008 is the year of Linux on the desktop. My parents’ desktop.

2008-01-30: Best troll of recent memory

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?

That sounds preposterous to me. It’s just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer from start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of Windows. Not possible. I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.

• Uncategorized