On 6/19/2014 8:13 PM, F. George McDuffee wrote:
On Thu, 19 Jun 2014 16:08:03 -0700, mike
wrote:
snip
Sure, you can get MUCH of the functionality you need,
as long as you're willing
to learn new apps, new procedures, new everything, and convert your data
and just say goodbye to stuff
that isn't compatible. The devil is in the details of that small
percentage of stuff isn't supported in linux, but you feel you
MUST be able to do.
/snip

So do a dual boot installation, and boot as required. My
Ubuntu setup will read most windows files with no problem
and OpenOffice/Libre loads them with no problems.


Here's the experiment I did.
I made a dual boot system with win7 and whatever version of whatever
distro with whatever desktop was popular at the time.

The experimental parameters were...
Boot any OS.
When you found something that REQUIRED the other OS,
boot that one and stay there until you found something
that REQUIRED the first OS.
(REQUIRED meant I couldn't find something applicable in the repository
that would actually install and work without intimate knowledge of missing
dependencies, wrong library version, compile from source... etc.)

Started with linux.
Very quickly had to boot windows.
NEVER needed to boot into linux again.
After a few weeks, I called the experiment conclusive and deleted
the linux partition.

At the risk of repeating myself, it's not about the 99.9% that linux
can do. It's about the 0.01 that a normal human can't do that's
a deal breaker.

Computer users, most of whom are windows users, don't have ANY
interest in learning that they can do the same stuff in a different
way, most of the time. They want it to just work. They/we have zero
interesting in knowing how or why. Just click the box and get what
we want. If I wanted another hobby, I'd get one...and it wouldn't
be linux.