Online Courseware doesn't like *nix much... (Score 1)

No sympathy for the referenced user, but I (a certified geek and Ubuntu convert) actually experience some pain daily when trying to access my online Ph.D. classes using one of my Ubuntu machines. The commercial courseware my university tailors to their use performs a JRE check at every start, which my machine fails despite having a current JRE installed; Javascript pop-ups with course announcements occasionally hang Firefox (a well-known issue with poorly-written scripts, but because they work in IE, the vendor doesn't fix them), and embedded media (usually Flash) is hit-and-miss. I've never had any problem submitting OpenOffice-generated .doc files, but the Word macros available to help with document formatting don't work, and I can fix formatting issues manually more easily than I can rewrite the macros.

This situation has actually improved over the last year or so; the browser check used to balk at Firefox and shut down. At least that's no longer an issue.

I'm willing to live with it as the cost of early adoption and agree with an earlier poster that this will only get better as more people (hopefully smart ones) leave their Windows and Mac environments behind.