Comment Re:Are open-source desktops losing? (Score 1) 663
People need Word in the same way other people need Emacs or Vim. It is their preferred tool for the job.
Then it's not a matter of "need" at all. If one is willing to give up all of the advantages Linux has over Windows so they can run a particular word processor (which IMO isn't very smart; a word processor is a word processor and there's not much difference between any of them), more power to them.
Well, we could argue that no one actually
The point I was trying to make is that even for applications with perfect compatibility (text files & Emacs/Vim) a user's preferences can be strong, and switching from one to another a rather time consuming thing. Migrating to another Office application (Word/Excel --> whichever is the OpenOffice clone) is just a lot more expensive because you don't have (whether we like it or not) perfect file conversion.
Honestly, a lot of people need Word, because in real life, you don't have any time during your work day to be figuring out conversion problems between Word and OpenOffice.
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For the perspective of an end user that prefers applications X, Y and Z only present in Windows, what kind of advantage does Linux actually offers? It used to offer more stability and security, but honestly I don't see Windows 7 being sensibly behind at these.