Comment 1526 for bug 1

Hi,

In my opinion (and possibly it has been mentioned before but I did not have the courage to read through all the posts) the main problem is the office suite one. I've switched to Ubuntu 3-4 years ago but and I don't think I will ever come back to Windows. However I still do need a virtual machine running Windows because when in a world dominated by the MS Office Suite documents you want to contribute efficiently OpenOffice/LibreOffice simply aren't up to the task (I'll be happy to stand corrected though).

Otherwise, yes, Linux and more specifically Ubuntu is a great OS : at home we switched to Ubuntu a few years ago and neither my son or daughter or wife would like to switch back to Windows. Again, however, as my son started his engineering studies and some of the tasks requires the use of Autodesk Inventor, we had to make his laptop dual boot into Windows 7.

I myself, as an engineer, cannot e.g. install a CATIA v5 viewer from Dassault Systems in Linux (again I need to use the virtual machine).

So, IMHO, it is not the quality of the OS that is holding back the penetration of the Linux OS in the market, but rather the lack of an office suite that is compatible with, like it or not, the dominating standard as well as other key software that is Windows only (AutoCAD, CST MicroWave Studio, CATIA v5, ...) or just works better on Windows (e.g. ANSYS).

I was told that as an outcome of the big look-and-feel law suites between MS and Apple the outcome was that MS was forced to produce an up to date MS office suite for Macs and that is probably Macs are still around (IMHO). I guess that Apple returned the favor by providing an iTunes that works on Windows (and their latest generation of iPods need iTunes to load music).

my 2 cents ...