On the brighter side of life, I can happily report that I have installed a NEW copy of Linux of an old laptop for my girlfriend. She will continue to use Windows on her personal laptop but will use my old stuff for familiarizing herself with Linux. She is considering a switch but wants to be sure she can be comfortable and productive in an open-source environment.

I definitely hope this works out better than my attempt to convert at work. :-)

I decided to start her out on Ubuntu. It's stable and well-featured. Because of this I have decided to switch my main platform back to Gnome (Ubuntu) rather than my usual KDE based environment. As much as I like KDE, it can be overwhelming for new users and Ubuntu's Gnome implementation always seems to feel more polished than it's KDE equivalent.

So, although KDE 4 looks AMAZING, I'm going to go with "works" for right now. If/when KDE 4 becomes as solid as Ubuntu's Gnome, I'll try it out again. In the mean time I have several thousand pictures that aren't very well organized at this moment because of F-Spot's rather crappy import. It REALLY should be able to label photos with EXIF tags.

Oh well. Maybe I'll start from scratch and move along.

Didn't Work Out

Well, it happens. I wound up deleting Kubuntu from my work machine and restoring XP to the entire hard-drive. My boss is kinda wondering why I was unproductive for a couple of days :-).

Why you ask?

Simple. More and more people are sending me .docx and .xlsx files which are files made by Office 2007. I can't open them under Linux. I can't keep asking people to convert them to .doc and .xls forever. With Office 2003, I was able to install a simple update from MS that will let me open and edit these newer files.

I have also developed a disturbingly long list of problems OOo has when saving .doc files. For example, if you highlight text in OOo, Word users will struggle to un-highlight the text because it's not highlighted. OOo uses a different Word function / featurethat NOBODY ever actually uses besides OOo.

So, I am back on Windows but at least I'm using a large number of cross-platform open-source tools. OOo IS installed and I use it when / where I can. I have Songbird installed as my media player. I'm using R for statistical analysis. And there are a few useful Windows-Only Apps that I'm using like Tinn-R. I may have to try and install Tinn-R in Wine to see how it works.

The upshot? I'm stuck with Windows until OOo, or some other Linux Office Suite, offers compelling, stable, accurate and complete Office Open XML read/write.