On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:30:52 -0500, Realto Margarino wrote:
> Ivan Marsh wrote: 
>
> Now that you mention it, you are right about Word. The WP available for
> Linux are amateur hour.  They are fine for some nerd who writes a letter
> once a month but for regular office work?  Word, and maybe Wordperfect,
> are the only ways to go.

That might have been the case last year; but with OpenOffice 2.0 out of
beta; that no longer is a reasonable assertion.   Its fast, its powerful,
its internally available macro languages are easily on a par with MS's
offering.  It reads and writes more file formats, it works on more
operating systems, and of course, its open source.

Couple that with Gimp and you're in really good shape for doc production.

> I use a program now called Cakewalk.  It is music processing software
> and nothing in linux compares to it.  If it ran in linux, I would use
> linux.  But it doesn't.  It runs in windows.  So I run windows.

Well, there's the reason you use windows, and really the only good one for
any OS.  You have a custom/particular piece of commercial software that
requires windows to run.   We use Encore here to write sheet music, it
runs on windows, and so, we have a windows computer to run it on.   There
is, of course, lilypond, but we've used Encore for so long, and we use it
for such "quick hack" stuff; that making the switch doesn't make sense.

> I guess I am an idiot because I measure an OS by its ultimate
> productivity.  You like an OS because it serves your anal cravings.

You're not really measuring the OS though.  All you are measuring is the
fact that your particular software runs on windows.

TeX is a counter example of an equally arcane nature.  Sure, there are
ways, with lots of effort, to get TeX running on a windows system.
Contrast that to thirty minutes with nearly any linux distribution and a
marginally suitable CPU (486 or better, 64 meg ram), and you've got a full
blown, working TeX system.  No muss, no fuss, works every time.

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