I've seen the future

[Tom]

I mentioned this to Phil and would be interested in other people's thoughts. My son installed the recent Suse Linux distribution last week - and it looks like the future to me. He says it is easier than installing XP and the OS looks a whole lot cleaner and faster than anything Bill has come up with. Most of Henry's software runs directly under Linux. Most of the time he uses Gimp but Photoshop and Dreamweaver are also on the machine, running with the aid of CrossOver Office 2.0. Corel and ArcGIS were designed to run under Linux.

A delightful feature of the setup is YaST (http://www.suse.de/en/private/products/suse_linux/prof/yast.html). You just tick the software you want to install from a list (eg Acrobat Reader) and the entire installation is automated. No rubbish about downloading the correct zip file for your OS, unzipping, choosing a directory, re-booting, making a cup of coffee.

Anyway, Henry's view is that 'even' I could switch to Linux. What do you think? I suspect that MS has missed the boat through allowing Longhorn development to be too long. IBM saw an opportunity and put its boot in the face of a hated upstart.

My current MS aggro is that Outlook has been getting slower and slower. Eventually I did a search on the problem. The answer is that the problem was probably caused by my failure to switch off instant messaging (under Options). So why did the creeps switch it on by default? Outlook files are opening much faster now but the programme is still slow to open. Presumably I have to disable some other default which had the main aim of making me use as many MS products as possible. Spit.

[francis]

You're not bound to Outlook/Express - there are other mail clients out there that are far better. The MS products, IIRC, store all mail as one file rather than as individual mails, so if you've got massive amounts of mail, this could be why things are slowing down. Have a look at Eudora (http://www.eudora.com/) (which is meant to be excellent) and also Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/) which is very good indeed (I've been using it since version 0.3).

I've been tempted to install a version on Unix on a PC for a few months, and with Dell offering brand new machines at the ludicrous price of £299, it's almost worth buying one just to flatten it and start again. It would be a huge leap to completely abandon a MS OS, especially without some backup in case things started going awry. But, it is tempting.

[Tom]

Henry ran a dual-boot with MS for about a year but has now dropped MS, wiith much rejoicing.