Why companies do not use Linux on the desktop

There is a very long running discussion on LinkedIn with the headline "Why aren't more corporations using Linux as a desktop OS?" and after a while I had the feeling of the same reasons and arguments returning again and again.

So I went over all the comments again and tried to categorize the opinions (trying to filter out those who already replied earlier with same or similar arguments.

Here is the result with the 15 most mentioned reasons of not using Linux on the desktop - from the opions of the discussing people (the red ones I consider in fact being issues to be solved, my comments in italic):

1. Slick Microsoft PR, Windows is the defacto standard or simply inherited monopoly. (18 votes)
   This is a fact, but not a reason for using Windows. If so, we would still ride on horses and don't have cars - just because horses were a monopoly for traveling (related to 11.)...
    
2. Missing appropriate software on Linux (for particular needs) / Vendor Lock-in. (18 votes) - Mentioned were in detail: Branch specific, special used apps not platform independent and/or not integrated well, AD, Deployment, AS400, Sage, Meeting- and Conference-Software, Photoshop, Exchange-Integration, Smart-Phone-Integration, AutoCAD, Screen Reader, ...
   Yes, this is really an issue - and that is because the fact mentioned above in 1. and hence followed by 6. The result is that many developers and software companies still just focus on Windows.
    
3. Compatibility issues Linux-Windows in software when collaborating. (13 votes) - Mentioned were in detail: MS Office vs OpenOffice/LibreOffice, some proprietary formats can't be read, Domain-Integration, Some websites are IE only, General compatibility-fears.
   The MSO vs OOL/LO issue is a really big one because many people write many documents and many people need to collaborate. There are many compatibility issues - already between different versions of Microsoft Office. The 2007 and 2010 docx, xlsx, pptx formats (yes, we have already two variants of the *x-formats) introduce a lot of possible conversion/open/save problems. I could write a long blog post just about those issues. Domain integration I do not consider important as I find the whole domain system outdated looking at current company structures (increasing cooperations between separate companies for example) and how they evolve. To develop IE-only websites nowadays is still done - although completely free of sense.
    
4. Too much tech-knowhow needed (just for nerds, servers and/or for commandline junkies). (11 votes)
   In reality, if you want good work to be done, on Windows you also need much in-depth knowhow. It's just, that quite every guy or girl, spent hours in front of the computer gaming, already considers himself/herself a computer guru...
   What simply is not true is, that you need to be a commandline junkie or a nerd to use Linux. Those days are a long gone - Linux has graphical environment!
    
5. People already know Windows and are simply resistant to change (and will struggle). (10 votes)
   Most people I met who showed resistance when I talked about Linux, weren't interested that much because they do not use computers that much - use it only when necessary for writing an email or surf some website. Those can be considered to be resistant to computers in general. Although even those could have a better computer experience going Linux, it's usually best to just let them continue until the next virus has biten their OS to death.
    
6. Lack of awareness / Ignorance or simply decision of management. (9 votes)
   Yes, is an issue. People simple don't open their eyes. This point is somehow related to 5. I found that most people currently in management, grew up with Windows. That's simply their comfort zone and usually they are so busy and so convinced of themselves that they simply don't consider anything different. This will change over the years, when more people grow up with Macs or Linux machines. I do trust, that even without active marketing, people will notice the advantages plus their current suffering and move over slowly.
    
7. (Migration) costs (get it to work, experience, train users etc). (9 votes)
   Related to 10. Of course, when considering a big change (and changing OS in a company is a big change anyway), investment is needed. I also have invested a lot of time into learning Linux, which only at the beginning is really tough until you understood some core things. And for the admins there is a lot more to learn than for the users. In my case I was so annoyed by Windows and the continuous suffering that - when I started - I was sure, it will be worth the investment - and it was! And honestly: Switching from XP to Windows 7 or from Office 2003 to 2010 is also eating a lot of money and requires additional training for the users.
    
8. Missing Linux Knowhow (and not enough time to dig into it). (7 votes)
   Related to 7. Of course, in the beginning there is missing know-how. But seriously: Switching from Windows Server 2003 to Server 2008r2 also required additional know-how - even worse - you think, you know it, but then you oversee some relevant changes (like the syswow64 registry hive and separate 32-bit executables in that folder) during your first attempts. You have to struggle with the new versions because Microsoft urges you by quitting support for the older OS versions. In reality you don't even have time to dig into the new Windows details, isn't it? - New details, new problems...
    
9. Hardware compatibility issues. (7 votes)
   Yes, you need to take care (which the normal default user does not - or cannot - when buying a new PC). I had problems with particular WLAN-cards, Bluetooth-adapters, sound and video cards first of all. Issue can be widely reduced by buying officially certified hardware for example (either by Canonical or the hardware vendor for example). Dell and Lenovo for example are vendors known to be very compatible with Linux (anyway you need to look at the particular model or just ask the vendor or partner of your choice). I usually recommend people: When buying, tell them that you want a Linux-compatible model - otherwise you will return it back).
    
10. Less educated specialists/administrators available or cost more. (7 votes)
    Related to 7. - I am pretty sure that a real good Windows administrator will also ask more. By tendency, there are more people working in Windows environment, but total number of real specialists I think is not significantly more than in Linux world. But I understand, that this can be an issue for a medium-sized or small company just watching out for the cheap administrator around the corner.
11. People don't want to run risks and do what the others do (using the market leader). (6 votes)
    Related to 1. Of course, if you do something new and you fail, people might argue and ask why the hack you didn't follow what the "expert" says. When you do something new then of course you make mistakes - but you will learn and get know-how. But you can do what fits for you. Doing, what the major part of others do (or recommend), you will never get, what really fits really good for your company.
12. Better support (because you pay for the software and have a contract). (6 votes)
    This is completely wrong! You can also get payed support in open source world and a commercial company does never give you the guarantee of continued maintenance. In fact I already invested into software technologies and then the vendor discontinued the product (without selling it to somebody else - just let it die). The history of Open Office and Libre Office shows us, that open source is even the better path here. Oracle thinking of unacceptable changes? - The project was forked quasi in an instant! As long there are some folks being interested in it, it can continue to life - even if it's just you - it's your choice.
     
13. Windows already there on the shipped PC. (6 votes)
    I have never ever kept the default installation on a PC - neither when I was still using Windows. In most cases it already started with partitioning that was not fitting my desires or needs. Next could be OS language or preinstalled software. And a Linux installation can be either done by a novice - it's easy (at least the Ubuntu, Mint or Fedora distributions - beside others). The only very annoying thing with a Windows preinstalled is: You already paid the license fee to Microsoft in that case and I am pretty sure, that Microsoft is not sad about it, if you overwrite your OS with Linux because: You don't consume bandwith, don't call support, don't ask stupid questions in forums etc - you pay without either asking a service for it...
14. Too much confusion because many distros, desktop environments. (6 votes)
    Are you confused and don't know what to use? - No problem, I do recommend Ubuntu with it's default desktop - and choose the LTS version. If you don't have an idea what you might want, Ubuntu for sure won't be a bad choice. But the point is: You have the choice! People work in different ways, have different priorities and have different jobs. You might discover later that you prefer a different distribution. You may consult distrowatch.com. At this point I still find the Ubuntu distribution the most stable one (regarding the complete set of applications existing around) offering everything I need regarding features and additional packages.
     
15. Windows (and apps) looks/works better, is easier to use and/or has better/more features. (6 votes)
    Simply not true. Why? Regarding the look: There are so many nice themes you can choose - for sure you will find one that you find cool. And of course you can choose a totally different desktop or window manager - there are so many around (you get an overview at wikipedia). Just combine the desktop of your choice with the theme of your choice - watch, what people do show on youtube! Finally you can either make your Ubuntu look like Windows XP or Windows 7 - watch this video. - Regarding the features: A standard Windows installation is totally barefoot and poor in relation to a standard Ubuntu installation. There isn't either Office installed by default (if you didn't buy it alltogether with MS Office included). People who find Linux has poor features sometimes think of particulare Windows software not available or running on Linux - that is more related to 2.

 Hope this helps.

Related posts: Popular Ubuntu desktop myths, Implementing effective computer security, Going Linux, Efficient desktop environment.

Efficiently following web news with RSS

As my productive machines are all running Ubuntu 10.04 where Firefox 3 is still the standard browser. It is not automatically updated due to a policy like "never change a running system". However, you can add another repository from Mozilla to get the latest stable Firefox, which I did a few weeks ago.

So I am probably one of the last persons suddenly missing the RSS feed icon at the right side of the URL location bar.

If you don't know, what RSS is: It gives you the possibility to read new blog and news site entries of different sites all from one place with the ability to track what you already read and what not - more information here.

I found this blog post telling that it got removed with Firefox 4 because only 3 percent of users ever clicked on that icon! - That is crazy! Are there still people surfing manually from one interesting page to the next? - I simply can't believe that!

Although I have upgraded to the latest Firefox already a while ago, I only now noticed the missing RSS button. I think, it is because I already have a quite stable set of feeds I read which does not change a lot any more. Maybe this is a reason for the 3 % statistics mentioned above...

Without RSS feeds I wouldn't be able to follow recent news in my areas of interest. There is so much news published on the internet and there is so few time to read. Without RSS feeds I couldn't get over the massive amount and read just the most important (and really new) information.

With the rising amount of smart phones I find it even more important to have RSS feeds as surfing the web on the smart phone is just annoying.

For all others, missing the RSS feed icon: It's now under Bookmarks -> "Subscribe to this page". You can get back the button by adding it to the toolbar (right-click into a free area on a toolbar and choose "Customize..." - there you find the RSS button which you can drag somewhere onto your toolbars).

Here is my way how I keep up-to-date:

1. I select sites (Blogs, News-Sites, Forums etc) that publish good content in areas of my interests.
2. I subscribe to those sites via RSS (clicking the Feedly RSS button) - Feedly is my favorite RSS reader.
3. Then I categorize the feeds into Computer, Linux, Development, News, Science etc so that I can read news by category when I don't have time to go through all.
4. Since having an Android smart phone I usually go fast through the headlines by starting the Google Reader Android app Feedly app while on bus or tramway - or waiting somewhere. I star/mark those items I want to read more in detail later or where I want to do more searching on the net for the topic - or if I want to comment later on a particular blog post.
5. When back on one of my laptops or desktop I go to Google Reader site click the Feedly-button again and switch to starred/read-later items - as the feeds are synced with my smart phone and across different machines whatever has been set to read or marked with a star is the same status on all machines automatically. When I am done with what I wanted to do, I remove the star and done.

Even if you an artist, teacher, plumber or other profession - no matter, there are plenty of sites that might be worth watching. Don't waste time by continuesly surfing from one site to the next where you can't see immediately what you already read and what not!

Related post: Mobile phone situation, Firefox and RSS feeds in Google Reader, Why RSS Feeds and alternatives to Google Reader.

Outlook 2010 Meeting requests

It's been months now that I (have to) deal more intensively with Windows world now. Although you might know that I prefer my Ubuntu desktop over Windows I am not one of the "fan boys" ignoring people's or business needs. Honestly, nobody can accuse me of being ignorant on any of both worlds. And honestly, I cannot recommend anybody to go with Microsoft and Windows as a long-term strategy.

One of the recent changes introduced with Outlook 2010 I want to share with you today:
Imagine, you are using Outlook and create a calendar entry. You want to invite a customer, partner, supplier etc - an external person at another company - to this event. You may further enter some agenda or other information before sending the meeting request. So far so good.


In the past it was known that not all e-mail clients or collaboration suites do support meeting requests. There has been an independent standard defined for sending and receiving meeting requests - it's the ICS format. Even Outlook learned to use that format!

Anyway, not every client is supporting this. Before Outlook 2010 Outlook always sent the meeting information as text also (as by the way all/most other mail-clients and collaboration do also).

With Outlook 2010 they removed the event information as text which might lead to the effect that your invited persons never notice that you wanted them to invite to a meeting. The meeting information is simply missing in the email!

I noticed that just because Thunderbird does not read .ics attachments if Lightning is not installed. Only after installing the addon you get the meeting information displayed. I really don't understand why one line of appointment information text is too much to expect...

Related posts: Outlook Calendar Meetings, Maintaining multiple calendars.

Windows and the command line

If I remember correctly I was about 14 when I wrote my first MS DOS batch file. I can't say that I write many of them but from time to time I think a VB script is too much for just some little work.

On the other hand I began to really learn Linux shell scripting only about 6 months ago. After that I find the Windows batch file language a very poor thing. It has a poor feature set, a lousy documentation and it is buggy. And this still applies for Windows 2008r2 - so I am talking about the newest OS version.

Right now I lost about two hours investigating a problem to find out that the batch file I wrote, did not work. The problem was caused at a completely unexpected place where I had a few lines that I previously tested separately - on the command line.

Guess what: Behaviour may be different if I run a command on the commandline or from within a batch file!

Here is an example - try this on the command line:

set var1=fluffi
echo _%var1%_ _%var2%_

The result will be: _fluffi_ _%var2%_

And now put those two lines into a .bat or .cmd file and run it.
The result is: _fluffi_ __

A pretty difference, isn't it!

In my case I was passing a string like this "blablabla%muh%bla" as parameter to a called program and the parameter did not fully arrive in the batch file while it did when I tried on the commandline.

What's that?!?! - Is this the Microsoft logic? - I think so... one only has to look at the evolution of MS Word...

Oh - I guess you want a solution: In the batch file you have to escape % doubling it - %%.

Related Post: The Microsoft Logic 

Microsoft & Skype

I guess you have not missed the news about Microsoft aquiring Skype. Although Microsoft told they will continue development on all versions of Skype I have my doubts - and so do others too.

Recently Digium, a company that develops an integration for Skype with Asterisk, had to give up because Skype/Microsoft is stopping the partnership - read here.

You are free with your own interpretations on this but I am already searching for a replacement for Skype.

The very sad thing these days is: As soon as a software got really good and really adds value and/or increases your productivity, it gets destroyed somehow - being prices getting too high or not being continued. This way we will never step out of the bronze age of IT...

What you can see here as an example: People often say that in Open Source world you don't have a guarantee that the software is supported and continued. As you see here, proprietary software is not different here. But in open source world there is always the option to fork (see OpenOffice->LibreOffice). This option is missing in proprietary world. So basically in Open Source world you are more safe!

Related post: The Open Source movement.

OpenOffice and LibreOffice starts slow

Sometimes there can be even annoying problems with Open Source software.

A few days ago I got annoyed by OpenOffice starting slow. Then I decided to switch to LibreOffice and first thought it helped. Then a day after it was slow again.

Finally I found out that it starts slow whenever I have the VPN connection open (using SonicWall NetExtender).

After searching the internet a lot without finding anything that helped I landed at LinuxQuestions at this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/double-clicking-on-open-office-files-leads-to-very-slow-opening-808048/

Running

sudo tcpdump -nnl -i any -s 1536 dst port 53

on the commandline discovered that LibreOffice was searching for .(none) via DNS and the VPN inserts it's DNS servers right in front of every other DNS entry in /etc/resolv.conf - grmpf!

So similar to what is mentioned in the thread above, I had to add
127.0.0.1    myhostname.(none)

to the file /etc/hosts - done. This and some other small, but annoying changes in reality need to be done at each install of a new system. - Of course, there are even more of those annoyances on Windows, but it seems you can't get rid completely of those... :-(

Related posts: Ubuntu 10.04 & docking station part 1 + part 2, Locale configuration on Ubuntu, Firefox change default page format.

IT fallout and buddhism

Today I had two thoughts about today's usual IT landscapes:

1. Windows is like radioactive fallout on the IT level. People accept it and somehow knowing about the problems and then get killed (through stress and burnout for example) by the effects - slowly and without them either noticing.
    
2. I need to take buddha as an example to accept the common IT flaws. Although he has seen the light, he returns in his free decision to this world to help people in their endless suffering. I somehow also feel to have seen the light because I see how things could be done better, but anyway I face Windows again and again at customers. I need to see this as an opportunity to assist people in their suffering. In most cases people are not able to finish their suffering and see the light... ;-)

Related post:  The truth about software.