Problems Linux Enthusiasts Refuse to Address

[Christopher Chan]

On Wednesday, April 06, 2011 01:24 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> On 5 April 2011 18:16, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> So, price was actually enough at that time - we didn't win the
>> desktop, but we gave it a damn good shake. What other thing could
>> Linux do ridiculously better to beat Windows?
> [...]
>> People don't seem to realise just how good Wine is these days. The
>> apps that don't Just Work tend to be (a) large (b) recent. But the
>> thing keeping someone on Windows is more often that Just One App that
>> they can't do without - and that app will usually work flawlessly in
>> Wine. YMMV, of course, but it's *always* worth a try.
>
>
> It occurs to me that a frontal assault on their mainstay might be fun.
>
> Businesses still run on XP. Approximately no-one has moved to Vista or
> 7. Even on new machines, which MS credits as shipped copies of 7,
> downgrading to XP is de rigeur.
>
> They also run on MS Office. Your desktop in most offices will be XP
> with MS Office. Many will give you Firefox as well, due to user
> clamour for something that works.
>
> Office, Outlook and Firefox on XP = standard business desktop for the
> past several years.
>
> So the suggestion is: how can Linux be a better upgrade from XP than 7 is?
>
> This is trickier than it looks. LibreOffice is slightly nicer to use
> than OpenOffice, but has a long way to go. MS Office is really very
> usable indeed, for all its instability and bugginess, and experienced
> MS Office users tend to *hate* OOo. Serious usability and
> compatibility work will be needed to knock over the incumbent here.
>
> Outlook and Excel are the two applications that need drop-in
> replacements that are better in some important way. The reason for
> these two is that they are apps actually used by the people who sign
> the cheques, not bought by them and inflicted on minions. They need
> disruptive replacements that do better on more than price in some
> important way.
>
> (We would *ideally* need a drop-in replacement for Outlook (that will
> work flawlessly with Exchange) *and* a drop-in replacement for
> Exchange (that will work flawlessly with Outlook). Many companies have
> dashed themselves to death against those two rocks in the last decade;
> if we can work around this replacement, it would be good to do so.)
>
> Anything I've missed?
>

Oh yeah. Group policy support. There is nothing on this front except for 
KDE 3 + kiosktool. Oh...NFSv4 acls but that might be just me.

Exchange replacement coming in the form of openchange but that is just 
server side. Client side has yet to start...anybody know of a project 
working with openchange on the client side of things?