Nobody has time to convert that GPL Office Star bs or whatever it’s called to a Word doc. Usually these apps have 50,000 configurable options and the users don’t know or care what half that crap is. When a parternet company and yours collaborate and share files via email it becomes one big uneeded headache. You best believe that all the templates are not going to carry over, yada yada and so forth. You ended up spending all this stupid time troubleshooting dumb issues and users are clueless of what the heck they are doing. Users have Windows at home so their supervisors don’t have time for them to learn a bunch of avoidable crap at work. It is just not worth it in the end.

Develop and enforce by your Data Security Policy, secure the users Windows Desktops properly, and go home on time.
I work in IT Network Security and I have absolutely no desire to ever troubleshoot a desktop again, nor am I a Microsoft fan, but the bottom line is even if I don’t I know that no matter what I do on the backend it’s still all about the user.

subject of “Freedom” is controversial if you ask, but that is a long issue to discuss here.

At the end, i am not a believer of OS’es or meaningless OS wars. IMO, in the near future desktop OS’es will lose it’s importance while most applications will work over the network. Games will move to consoles, and most will be actually server driven. Thus, interest in platform independent server side software developement will be increased. that is why i enjoy coding in Java. it is performant, and i do not care about the underlying operating system.. of course, this is my opinion.

It could be easier, but is already easier enough if you really believe you have something to gain from the effort. The problems you mention with hardware are common, but it is not Linux fault. Not all hardware vendors are supporting Linux, although the numbers are growing, and also the number of hacks to get through vendors blockades. If vendors just stopped been foolish our experience with Linux will be better. I also have had many hardware compatibility problems, but my experience with Linux software has been more than great when those are conquered. (my Linux stuff, if interested)

Why Windows and Mac OS have less problems? Because hardware vendors prefer to pleased them, as peasants bow to their overlords. I can understand that, they have to make money, but their hardware will cost me the same if I want it for Win, Mac or Linux. So, what is the deal?

I advocate Linux as a way to gain freedom, to free ourselves from equivalent or inferior technologies that want to control what you do and sell you inferior solutions disguised as userfriendly features.

Your account of Linux annoyances is truthful, but I do not agree with your conclusion (and you are not the only one) about desktop Linux in general. My experiences and the way I deal with Linux problems take me the other way.

To long a comment. Sorry, Nasty One . I think I will revamp it as a post later and make a trackback to your post.