I am running an experiment. This is how my desktop looks:
As this illustrates, I am trying to run only open source (and free) products on Windows XP. I use OpenOffice for my office documents, Firefox (1.5 is out now!) as my browser, Thunderbird as my email client, and Sunbird as my calendar.
I don’t miss Word, PowerPoint and Outlook the least. The MS Office install-CD sits in the CD-tray, but I have not once felt a need or urge to install it.
4 Comments.
Great John – now for the final jump, I guess you need to install Linux. Linuxshoppen.dk has an offer on SuSe with a seminar (this saturday) included – B there 😉
Actually, I do have Linux on a partition of my laptop. I don’t think I’m ready to switch to this as my everyday environment. I’ve used Linux on my servers for years now, and here it’s my preferred platform.
Oh, sorry, I got some Christmas thingy on Saturday, so can’t join you.
Good to hear about your success running the open office applications. Have you any experience with open project management applications?
For personal, non-governmental and non-confidential projects, I’ve used the web application BaseCamp, but I’m not finding an open alternative to MS Project, either to have a open format or use on an OS X or other Mac or Unix OS.
Barbara,
I’ve used BaseCamp too. It’s innovative, but sometimes “less is more” just doesn’t do it …
I have tried a few OSS project management tools, but so far none that impresses me (I’m on the other hand someone who dislikes all such tools; never used MS Project with any benefits). But there are many I haven’t tried; see http://proj.chbs.dk/ for a list of links to tools.