[vox-tech] Questions about building my own box

[Micah Cowan]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 11:09:43PM -0600, Jay Strauss wrote:
> Preface: I'm not starting a war, but....
> 
> I have my linux (HP, Sun et al) machines where I run Oracle, write my perl
> scripts, monkey with DBI/DBD/Mod_perl stuff, but I like the M$ Office suite,
> IE, and outlook.
> 
> I don't love M$, but I like their above products.

So do I, except for Office.  Office is horrid.  Interface is great -
but the resulting files are horrid.  Especially compared to what I can
do with TeX or Apache's XML tools.

> I tried to make the
> switch to a linux desktop but didn't like the apps.  I promise you guys, if
> M$ ported Office, IE, and Outlook to *nix, you'd all be using them.

Not a chance.  For a long time, I had lamented that there were no
browsers even *close* to comparable to MSIE.  Now with recent versions
of Mozilla, I lament no more.  In fact, I even prefer to use Mozilla
on my Windows machine.

Outlook I've never missed.  Never liked it much anyway, and mutt, or
emacs' rmail-mode, offers me the ability to read my mail without
reaching for the mouse (which can be annoying).  However, if I *did*
miss Outlook, I'd switch to Evolution - in fact, I am experimentally
switching anyway.

However, that Mozilla and Evolution have "stolen" so much from MSIE
and Outlook are testaments to their solid GUI design (despite their
crappy security, etc.).  So obviously, those are some of MS's good
products.  But better ones now exist.

As to Office - I haven't used a Word Processor in a couple years.  Not
nearly enough power to 'em.  Sure, the interface is convenient, but
it's *power*, not convenience, that I crave - and for that, the choice
is clear: content-oriented (vs. format-oriented) typesetting tools
like TeX or FOP.  Nobody's ever made a Word document can touch my
DocBook documents.  And I'm not even that good.

Micah