Reply to: Who here uses OSS for serious work?

[_V_]

MS is all you'll ever need, and if you follow the Chinese way of doing things, just a free as OSS.

[Nipple Clamp]

i like fireworks for quick web graphics

OSS has never been my bag.. too many pipe smoking virgins hating windows and giving tulip info for my liking....hard to get anywhere with it.

Yup, that's been my experience on the whole. The geeks who develop this stuff tend to assume that everyone who uses it will have as much commitment to it as the authors, not to mention a train-spotter memory and liking for a vast assortment of fussy details, and in many cases the patience and dedication to study code in lieu of non-existent manuals and struggle with obscure Unix admin and setup issues which they assume everyone must find as effortless to deal with as them. If these guys sold cars, they'd deliver them in about ten pieces with a few missing or the wrong size.

Recently I've found the same even with Java: Tried to install the Java Run-Time on Windows XP, to run an open-source (and admittedly quite snazzy and useful looking) SVG editor. But guess what - the install bombs out half way through with some meaningless message. It may have something to do with scripts being disabled on my PC; but if they can't be bothered to test even that, then I'll give Java a miss.

[Ardesco]

It was word douments that had lots of tables and index pages and such that always seemed to get thier formatting screwed up for me, or excel spreadsheets that had lots of drop down lists and stuff like that.

The basic stuff always worked fine. I have always blamed MS personally

[Xenophon]

I've made a small fortune with OSS, particularly Linux, PHP and MySQL.

It generally works best for people who aren't technologically oriented as everyone else wants you to do Microsoft stuff. The end result is the same, so I don't see what the problem is.

I've made a huge fortune.

threaded

[Cowboy Bob]

How does OpenOffice deal with MS Office documents these days, or are you lucky enough to not have to deal with the evil that is.....

I never have a problem personally. Though I don't have any documents that have large amounts of VBA macros or stuff like that in them.

[TheMonkey]

I've made a small fortune with OSS, particularly Linux, PHP and MySQL.

It generally works best for people who aren't technologically oriented as everyone else wants you to do Microsoft stuff. The end result is the same, so I don't see what the problem is.

[Xenophon]

what kinda pipe do you have?

Are you trying to get this thread moved to Light Relief, kramer?!?

No wait, I see what you mean...

[Ardesco]

EDIT : Oh yeah, my main development machine runs Ubuntu. For games I have an XBox 360

How does OpenOffice deal with MS Office documents these days, or are you lucky enough to not have to deal with the evil that is.....

[kramer]

what kinda pipe do you have?

[Cowboy Bob]

Anyone using WebSphere is using large amounts of OSS. Anyone connecting to the Internet on a Windows machine is using the BSD TCP/IP stack. Everyone posting here is using OSS software. Anyone developing on Eclipse/Rational Dev Platform is using OSS software. This list goes on.

If you know you are using OSS, you are using bad software. If it works how you expect it to, then it is good software.

EDIT : Oh yeah, my main development machine runs Ubuntu. For games I have an XBox 360

[kramer]

i like fireworks for quick web graphics

OSS has never been my bag.. too many pipe smoking virgins hating windows and giving tulip info for my liking....hard to get anywhere with it.

[DaveB]

Was with you up until the GIMP Dave.

GIMP has to be the worst bit of image editing software I have ever used.

Yes! Even the latest version.

I'm a long time user of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and even JASC (now Corell) PaintShop Pro - which is a very capable web and print production tool, that is unfairly sniffed-upon by 20 year old "media pro's".

Heh, horse for courses I guess. I never got on with Illustrator or Photoshop

[bogeyman]

I dont use OSS desktop OS's, mainly cos I cant be arsed, but I do use apps like Open Office - The free version of Sun's Star Office. Works very well and talks nicely with MS documents as well. The Gimp is excellent for image processing and I use any number of OSS network tools.

Was with you up until the GIMP Dave.

GIMP has to be the worst bit of image editing software I have ever used.

Yes! Even the latest version.

I'm a long time user of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and even JASC (now Corell) PaintShop Pro - which is a very capable web and print production tool, that is unfairly sniffed-upon by 20 year old "media pro's".

[Ardesco]

I have found ubuntu to be a very good and everything worked well. The biggest problem I had is the lack of MS Office. Open Office is great but when you start transporting complex documents back and forth they seem to screw up.

This being said i haven't used OpenOffice for about a year so it may be better now, the main reason that I switched my main machine back to Windows XP was for games support, it is just much easier getting all of them running on windows. If I could get the latest version of Office working 100% correctly on Ubuntu I would probably switch back to it for my laptop.

[DaveB]

I dont use OSS desktop OS's, mainly cos I cant be arsed, but I do use apps like Open Office - The free version of Sun's Star Office. Works very well and talks nicely with MS documents as well. The Gimp is excellent for image processing and I use any number of OSS network tools.