Yes, it was sarcasm. I was referencing the circular linkage on the website. Click "learn more" and you go to page 2, which links you to about (the homepage).

The joke is that if you click the first link, then the second link, you end up back where you started. It doesnt look like anyone got the humor though.

It was a joke; if you check you will see that the two pages I linked to form a circular reference.

Gideon won on appeal through SCOTUS. Thats the entire point. If anyone pulls another Gideon, the case will be immediately won on appeal by any first year law student.

Exchange / server 2003 dont tend to just randomly blow up. Usually if you investigate you'll find something the user did, or some bizarre extenuating circumstance.

My favorite is when people clear out the "log files" to free up disk space, and then wonder why the information store wont mount.

I think you are dismissing your relative's complaints as habit too quickly. I got my brother on LO a while back, and he gave it a serious try (would have saved $250!) for several weeks before showing me several features LO lacked, like proper callout notes in word.

I myself have written term papers in LO, and compared with MS Office some of its footnoting / endnoting / formatting conventions are nightmarish.

That comparison sort of demonstrates the issue that a lot of geeks have: technical superiority is irrelevant. What matters is:
  1) Are the features included the ones that users actually want?
  2) Are the features included easily discoverable?
  3) Do those features work consistently, and fit with the user workflow?
  4) Is the interface polished and well designed?

Its worth noting that even during the ribbon change, people were preferring Office over LibreOffice. So either the ribbon wasnt that bad, or Libreoffice was that much worse.

Too many geeks will look at a product and say "but it does this!" while ignoring that its not what the user wants.

Gideon makes such an outcome improbable, and if it happens will end up in an appeals court with the case being overturned due to lack of qualified representation.

What are they teaching kids in schools these days? Back in my day Gideon's Trumpet was in the curriculum and we went over all the key / formative SCOTUS rulings over the US's history.

It might have been funny, if I hadnt gotten complaints from every single person Ive recommended oOO to over the years, and had every single one end up buying office.

And its not even like its just that theyre familiar with Office; oOO lacks serious polish and is sometimes maddening to work with.

Look, its easy. On the https://wiki.debian.org/Freedo... page, theres a link to Learn about Freedombox, which Im sure gives useful information on the project. Heck, that page even links to additional resources here.

Like I said: Easy.

That was me, and its not Dubious. RedHatLinux 4 is in "extended" support / the last phases of its support, and thats ~2005. Nothing older than that is supported by them. No commercial Linux distro from 2002 is currently supported; not even the kernel is actively maintained (it was EOL'd 2 years ago).

You can find a consultant to support it, Im sure, if thats any consolation.

I am the wrong person to get into the nitty gritty of it, but I believe this is handled by Side-by-Side dependencies (SxS) in windows. I have only very rarely seen dependency problems on Windows, even going back to the days when XP was new and 2000 still roamed the earth. Linux dependency problems are less common but theyre definitely a bigger issue than Windows ones.

Microsoft is still supporting Vista, which is ~9 years old at this point. No other major OS vendor is supporting an OS that old; as I said RedHat is the closest, with their RHEL 5 support.

I imagine a transition from RedHatLinux 7 (Valhalla) to RHEL 6 would be similarly nightmarish. Lets compare apples to apples, shall we?

It is karmawhoring because Firefox is a far bigger problem these days than IE10 / 11 / soon-to-be-12, and at the moment the single biggest security vulnerability out there is a FOSS one.

Arguing that Microsoft is "bad" because theyre not FOSS (which is really what you are driving at) is irrelevant. Everyone knows they ship proprietary software, but that has no relevance either to this story or to the quality of their code. As we've seen, OpenSSL has a bug that has been hemorrhaging private keys and passwords for days while the closed-source Schannel has not seen such a bug.

Ideological spiels about how Windows sucks simply because its proprietary are really getting kind of old. If you dont like closed-source software, dont use it, but dont pretend that the license has an impact on code quality; there are a number of FOSS vs proprietary examples where FOSS is horribly deficient.