[ale] Best Desktop Env or Distro for Windows users?

[Irv Mullins]

On Wednesday 21 August 2002 10:43 am, you wrote:

> Uh.  If the Company President, or Office Manager, or whover is in charge of
> these decisions, mandates that this is the new corporate Desktop, the Users
> will have no say-so about it.  They *can't* refuse to use it - all they can
> do is complain amopngst themselves, and worst-case, quit and go work
> somewhere else.

I've seen that happen. After complaining for a couple of months, the 
most productive people sometimes do just that - move on - it's easy for them 
to get better jobs. In the meantime, all that complaining is costing 
productivity, and annoying the managers.  There'll be a few who 
will spend their time searching for flaws in the plan, and making sure 
that management is painfully aware of those flaws. 

> Managements *only* concern should be that they have the tools they need to
> do their job well.

Management is concerned with showing a profit. Money spent re-training 
people already familiar with Windows cuts into profit.  Add to that the very 
real fact that 90% of new hires will have some experience with Windows,
but not with other systems. Training then becomes a continuous and 
unjustifiable extra expense which dwarfs any saving on licenses or hardware.

> No, I'm not really the cold-hearted bastard I may sound like, but really -
> is Management providing these people computers so they can play with them,
> or so they can do their work?  People used to get by with pen, paper and a
> typewriter, so do *not* tell me they* have* to have KDE eye-candy to be
> able to write a letter, send a fax, or create a Proposal, send email or
> browse the web.

Then they don't need the "eye candy" of a GUI at all - throw away that 
window manager, and use text mode.  Better yet, forget Linux, because 
there's certainly no need for a fancy, multi-user operating system just to 
write letters, send e-maili, etc.  Toss the computers out, buy IOpeners 
for everybody. That should be the perfect solution.

Quick, buy some IOpener stock.

Irv




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