happiness at work and play

[_toastedcheese_]

For a while now I have advocated some open source software over it's proprietary equivalents - for some clients a simple change away from MS Office can be a saving of over a million dollars per year (every year!) in licensing costs. I tell people that if they are that keen to get rid of their money, switch to Open Office and donate the money to a

Comments

[danox]

seeing both of those task bars on the same screen is surreal. but good for you. I remember when I first went completely linux, it was such a sweet feeling.

hey, according to the IBM website, the latest domino designer runs on windows, osx and linux. Says it supports suse, redhat and ubuntu. Have you tried the native linux version?

[_toastedcheese_]

sadly that's just the notes client. designer and admin are still windows only. I do run the integrated sametime/notes client natively and it is about a squidillion times faster than it's windows counterpart.

IBM are copping a fair amount of flak over this issue but they assert that there is not enough demand for them to port all of the clients. I can understand this argument: not supporting popular OSes == reduced market share and lets face it on average how many developers and admins are there per hundred users, one, one half? probably a lot less as the number of users increase. and it costs money to support more Oses. but it's a little chicken and the egg sort of idea. if there was a native linux client I bet a lot more dev/admins would be using it and thus there would be demand. also how weird would it be if your whole company went open source and you were the only one stuck on windows! le boo!

[danox]

I'm sure there are technical reasons why this is hard, but I thought that the new notes developer client was built on eclipse. ... maybe I'm wrong about that. But if it is, it seems like the kind of porting project that IBM could just stick one or two developers on.

Its like you say, there won't be a demand until they do it cause domino developers are so conditioned to run windows anyway. And yeah, the idea that you could run your domino server on linux, have all your users running domino clients in linux but force your developers to use windows is so, so silly!

[_toastedcheese_]

yeah, it's super weird, with it being built on eclipse you almost feel like they could just recompile it and presto - linux/OSX clients! admins already have a web client that does 90% of what they want so it wouldn't be too hard to make it feature complete and take the pressure off porting that client across at the same time if you didn't want to. most admins I've ever met are all about windows anyway so maybe no-one will care. this whole thing confuses me.

[bastardang]

i hope you're digging the whole death/rebirth feelings that real seasonal changes bring as much as i always did. ;)

[_toastedcheese_]

i like the rebirth part a hell of a lot better than the death part, feeling each day get colder and colder - far beyond any reasonable level of cold - gets disturbing.

[melancholywhore]

You are a hardcore bbq man. Defy nature my friend, defy!

[_toastedcheese_]

i shall have barbequed meats. I shall!

[dibkins]

s-so you upgraded to windows XP then? it has faster searches than 95!

[_toastedcheese_]

i liek teh shiny buttons.

[sayfin]

sounds pretty sweet. me, i'm just impressed even with your screenshot. it looks so shiny and wonderful. i wish i had a totally awesome computer, and totally awesome computer skillz to go with it.

[_toastedcheese_]

awww thanks! the truth of the matter is that the stinkpad™ I use is nothing special - i think you can buy them new for about $1K these days - but it's more than enough to run linux. the shiny OS is that way out of the box (and I know I'm breaking some l337 h4xx0r bylaw here by admitting this but) with no real mad skillz required. sadly there isn't currently a scrivener for linux but you could always run it in an OSX virtual machine. Hey! that's what I should build for mandellebrotte, thanks for the idea!