Re: Yahoo! News - Linux Expands Beyond the Office Into the Home

Actually, the point was that people have problems transferring FILES 
from linux to windows .. without experiencing 'glitches'.  If I were to 
guess, I'd assume this is due to the complexity of configuring SAMBA, 
AND the simple fact that, while Linux apps can read "Windows" type 
files, they do a pretty lousy job of exporting files in those formats 
which are anywhere near the equal of the original, with regards to quality.

Try taking an MS Office doc, an HTML document with nested tables, an 
excel spreadsheet, etc.. import it into OpenOffice or KWord .. etc..   
already you'll see that it doesn't look as nice as it did in word.  Now 
save it and send the same file back to windows, and it will look 
downright crappy.

Next.. write a document in Kword or OpenOffice, then save/export it to 
MS Word format, excel format, powerpoint format... etc..  IF you can.  
Now open it in MS Office..  does it look the same?  My experience says no.

Even simple HTML docs suffer under this test.


And no.. the correct answer is NOT to browbeat people into using file 
formats native to linux.  It's not realistic, and it will only get you 
labeled a 'zealot'.  (PDF isn't good either for 'working documents' 
since they're essentially readonly)

N. Thompson wrote:

> Zackary D. Deems wrote:
>
>>
>> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&e=2&u=/nm/20041224/tc_nm/biztech_linux_dc 
>> <http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&e=2&u=/nm/20041224/tc_nm/biztech_linux_dc> 
>>
>
>
>
> If I read that correctly the article mentioned that people were having 
> trouble transferring "data" from a Linux computer to a Windows 
> computer because the applications are different across the two 
> platforms. The thought occurred to me that if we ever market a boxed 
> Ark Linux product we might also benefit from including a CD in that 
> boxed set that includes Linux software ported to Windows like 
> OpenOffice.org, Inkscape and others since the alternative is to export 
> it in Windows compatible file formats which frequently mean some loss 
> in formatting will be experienced. We wouldn't even have to make the 
> CD ourselves since TheOpenCD ( http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/ ) already 
> does this for us, all we might have to do is update the include 
> software a little which shouldn't be that hard since if I'm not 
> mistaken they used the gecko engine and html to make their 
> autorun/installer program..
>
> Any thoughts?
>