Moving to Ubuntu - a first hand account

There was discussion earlier that for office use, Windows rules and transition to Linux for office use would be difficult. One of the logical reasons and rather correctly is that Windows OS is heavily entrenched in our training curriculums with the reasoning that 'we all use it for Office use' - and Linux is not used in Offices with the excuse that 'no one knows it or is comfy with it' (if you don't train people, how can they be comfy - logic isn't is :-). So we have the classic Chicken-and-egg story here, ironically!! (it is rather amusing how many miss this simple logic!!)

Anyway, with my views that every educated IT user (that means nearly all of us!!) should be comfy in at least two OS, and maybe two different word processing software (yess, later very important :-), its time many of us usher in 20Ten getting multi-IT-skilled!!!

Can we do it? Well, came across an interesting blog (http://bit.ly/8nXtYc) of Mrs. Amber Graner, (an ex-US Army veteran) who moved from Mac to Ubuntu and doing an yeoman service to the Open Source Community.

Why I am sharing this is that for all those who feel that changeover to Ubuntu for Office use would be difficult, this blog just shows that it is not at all difficult. Of course here we are talking individuals instead of Organisation, but than every individual can make a difference!! And maybe change the system.

=====Extract from the blog http://bit.ly/8nXtYc===============

I decided that I finally wanted to make the transition from Mac to Linux. What fueled the change - and intrepid CD and an Ubuntu T-shirt that read, "Linux for Human Beings". I sorta laughed when my husband came home from a Sprint in the UK and said. "I have something for you." I looked at the CD and the Shirt and said, "yeah right". However, I had wanted to use Linux for years, but *always* without fail had to turn to my husband to fix things and help me, so I tended to always fall back to the Operating System I was the most familiar with. While my husband was busy working on various Linux distributions , I was moving slowly from DOS to Windows to Mac, then in Feb 2009 landed pretty smoothly into a Linux distro I could feel comfortable with - Ubuntu. I haven't looked back, every once in a while I brush off the Mac, and use it for something. I don't dislike Mac, I just like using Ubuntu better.