> Sorry, Nukes win hands down in every category.

Let's turn off our brain. Solar panels don't kill people when they don't work correctly.

Linux, plain and simple, is not user friendly

It's not incredibly HOME-user or POWER-user friendly...

But locked-down CORPORATE-user friendly? HELL YEAH.

Your IT department sets-up a computer with just 5 big bright icons on the desktop. These are the only applications you use for your job. You can't do anything else but launch these applications. It just keeps working like that 99.999% of the time. When something doesn't work, you call IT about it, move yourself to another computer and resume your work there. There is no way for any computer to possibly be more user-friendly than that.

Linux does it, Windows doesn't.

If you spend more than 2 days total over the course of an employees time at a company to convert them from MS Windows and Office to Linux you've lost money, even on the lowest paid employee you have.

Unless you're at EOL on your Windows and Office version... Then you're going to have-to upgrade them to a new version that works completely differently, anyhow. ANY time spent training them on the new version of Windows and Office is money lost, in addition to the license fees, with NO benefit.

At least the time/money lost on training to use Linux has a payoff period.

That's a good move for KDE, and it helps users a bit, but does nothing to help you find and install the applications you want in the first place.

Photoshop is the big exception, and it probably only worked because of "photo" right in the same.

I've never heard of someone "iTunesing" or "Winamping". Nobody has ever "Firefoxed" the web, or "Outlooked" their e-mail.

The Microsoft party-line has always been that retraining employees to use Linux is far more expensive than paying those license fees... It was always a ridiculous argument, since Microsoft products make major UI changes between versions that require just as much training.

But here, the employees are trained and working on Linux. So how is it that the fees for all that Microsoft software, PLUS the retraining fees, PLUS the undeniable reports of money savings, are still going to make a switch to Windows somehow worthwhile?

I don't find that annoying, so much as unbelievable. What surprises me is that they can still find anyone to believe them after lying so often.

OTOH, I can hope that it's true, and that they actually HAVE reformed. I'm just going to let the evidence accumulate for awhile before I believe it. Possibly in a decade....

Well, to be honest Gnome3 didn't help things any. Neither did whatever that mishmash that Ubuntu is up to. xfce isn't really slick enough for corporate work. Etc. KDE4 still isn't as good as KDE3 was, but it's definitely mainly usable, and can look as pretty as you desire.

My real guess is that they forgot what a nightmare it was to deal with MSWind, so now the problems with Linux are looming a lot larger in their minds. Please note, however, that this is just a guess.

Linux Desktop developers have pissed me off mightily in the last few years, but not enough that I'd consider going back to MS, or even back to Apple.

There were those who were sure that anyone exposed to Linux would immediately prefer it over MSWind. Most people were a bit more cautious, but figured that the city would prefer to save money and have control over its own destiny. Others have been cynical since before the plan was first announced, on various different grounds. Some people actually think that MSWind is better. Some think that the applications available under MSWind are better. Some just think that the party with more wealth and power will always win.

Anyone who pretends that there was ever unanimity here is wrong. OTOH, I really wonder what is causing the about-face at this point of the game. (Though not enough to do ANY research. Yes, I read the "The users want it" explanation, but that doesn't do much to convince any organization, so there's clearly something else happening. And it could just be one politician with a hair up his ass.)

Let's conveniently ignore the damage to the environment too ...

Good-luck getting past: NIMBY.