From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Jan 2 18:23:24 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id SAA01749 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Sat, 2 Jan 1999 18:23:24 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from guru.phone.net (guru.phone.net [209.157.82.120]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA01744 for ; Sat, 2 Jan 1999 18:23:23 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mwm@phone.net) Received: (qmail 29280 invoked by uid 100); 3 Jan 1999 02:22:59 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 3 Jan 1999 02:22:59 -0000 Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1999 18:22:59 -0800 (PST) From: Mike Meyer To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: Freebsd what is it like? In-Reply-To: <01C5CFD59D5AD1118AA400805F14B8F9231781@bollnt04.BOLLNAS.KL.SE> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [Falling for what's probably a troll.] On Sun, 3 Jan 1999, Peter "Luna" Altberg wrote: > But no desktop user who is supposed to do anything but PLAYING with free > s/w, should abandon "Micro$oft". You teenagers out there can talk all > you want about "free BSD" for desktops. It's still an illution. There's > just not the software out there for it. You can't make a livin' by > running spreadsheets the latest "Deamon News Style": Emacs => awk => ss. > Three programs instead of one: Excel... My teenage years are more than a decade behind me, and I find the illusion to be *much* more productive than anything from MicroSoft. The only problems I have are from people who already "drank the koolaide" (as an ex-Machead coworker put it) sending me documents designed for a world in which nobody runs software from anyone but Bill Gates. I don't need to run spreadsheets (I get to do createve work for a living), so I don't know what the OSS spreadsheet situation is like. I do know that real office software is one of the few things that OSS has problems with - because the OSS authors have little or no need for it. If your work on a computer centers around spreadsheets or short documents, or bank accounts, or short documents - you're better off not running OSS. If you want to run OSS but really need those capabilities, you can use the commercial Linux offerings: Star*Office or Corel's OfficeSuite (or whatever it's called), for example. By the way, the replacement for Excel isn't Emacs/awk/ss, it's psql. It's still one program - and it's still scriptable.