[citation][nom]antilycus[/nom]Try again, linux is, by far, the most used operating system in the world.I've been doing this for years without a single problem. Creating, open and edit, change, MS Office 2003, 2007 AND 2010/12 without anyone ever complaining. While I am sure there are people out there that have issues, Microsoft is the problem here, not the answer. Open Document system was created for a reason, Microsoft needs to get off their high horse and businesses need to be smarter about who they hire or contract to design their I.T. systems. MS is on it's way the door. The only people that don't want to believe that are I.T. admins for windows networks, ones that are of the mind set (if something new comes out, we have to get it, its only a matter of it). It's that mind set that has destroyed computers in business today.Long and skinny, Libre Office is a massive threat to Microsoft and they are trying to make it dissappear by creating an Office suite for Linux, even though it already has a great one (which happens to be free).[/citation]
I'm sorry. It took me a few minutes to stop laughing. There is no way that Linux is the most widely user OS in the world. And there is also no way Microsoft is even close to being on it's way out the door. Especially in the Business world. The computing world in the business sector is dominated by Microsoft. I mean seriously dominated. *nix has made great strides. There is no doubt about that. We use a fair number of Suse, and Redhat servers at work, and they work damn well. No question. BUT, when it comes down to productivity, and interoperability, there is nothing in the *nix world that comes close to how well the Microsoft ecosystem meshes. With the wide scope of software out there that business uses, trying to get it all to play nicely between flavours of Linux would be (and is) a nightmare. We have several sandboxes setup just to play with that sort of thing. Plus the existing software would all have to be re-written for linux. And I'm not talking about having it run on WINE either. Running native. That's a several Billion or more expense I really don't see the companies of the world taking on. And don't even make the joke about having open source communities do it. Sure, in some cases it could be done quicker. But most businesses don't just buy a product. They buy the support for that product. If a prod server or application is down, business wants it back up NOW or sooner. They want a dedicated support team to help them. Not some community of developers who'll get to it after their done their pizza. Our *nix admins here at work are damn smart. Their command of Linux and Unix is fantastic, and even they are smart enough to know Linux's limitations. They know it's next to impossible to have over 600 servers supporting almost 10,000 workstations all running linux, with the wide variety of software we use for daily business.
I've been an IT Admin for almost 20 years now, and I can tell you, there is no hope in hades of Microsoft going out the door anytime soon. And no I'm not an M$ fanboi. I support the Microsoft platform at work, but I have been a Mac / Unix guy at home for quite a few years now. The only people who think Linux will rule the world in the next decade are naieve "stick it to the man" types of kids.