Re: tlug: Office suite for use under Linux

[Manuel Chakravarty <chak@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> wrote

> >>>>> "Karl-Max" == Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com> writes:
> 
>     >> And you can call the MS-trained technical support (at least
>     >> here at Tsukuba-Dai, you can).  Linux doesn't have training
>     >> classes yet.
> 
>     Karl-Max> How about setting them up ? Tsukuba-Dai is supposed to
>     Karl-Max> be one of the foremost universities of Japan. A little
>     Karl-Max> progressivity would stand them in good stead.
[...]
> No, I think there is little hope for progressive behavior from
> Tsukuba-Dai.  The faculty is certainly not averse to the current
> system; except for a few of us with special needs, the huge amount of
> money that flows to Tsukuba-Dai in return for no discernable (extra)
> production of research is more than sufficient compensation.  (And
> it's counter-productive, as the faculty use Macintoshes and 200MHz P6
> boxes without thought of cost, while the students have to suffer with
> bloated software on lowend notebooks.  No wonder they think computers
> cause more problems than they solve.)

Tsukuba-dai is not all that bad.  In my group, we have two
Win95 boxes plus one NT server opposed by a dozen PCs
running Linux plus a handful of SPARCs running Solaris.
(And by the way, our students also got rather powerful
machines, but that depends of course on the funding of each
individual group.)

In my experience, both in German and in Japanese
universities, the picture is like this:

* The computer science people use Un*x machines, and have
  some Win machines for secretaries etc.

* Physics etc people often use quite a number of Unix
  machines, because they need some high-end workstations or
  supercomputers that simply don't run anything else.

* The other departments use Win or Macs.

Karl, the Technical University of Berlin is the only German
university that I know of which uses Unix machines for their
undergrads.  And they can do it only because they have an
exceptionally highly qualified bunch of sysads.  (Try to
hook up about 600 SunOS/Solaris boxes and a couple of other
machines into *one* virtual file system using NFS, then
you'll know what I mean.[1])

So, why are computing people using Un*x?  I think, because
(a) they can afford spending quite some time exploring a
complex OS (and often even enjoy this) and (b) because they
use the features of a powerful OS much more than other users 
would (they tend to do a lot of programming etc).

In other words, for computing people, ease of use is
secondary, power is more important; but, for most of the
other users, it is the other way around.  (It seems that
this matches well with the view repeatedly expressed on this
list: Without Linux being easier to use, it will have a hard
time getting broad acceptance.)

Cheers,

Manuel

P.S.: This post, of course, comes with all the usual
      disclaimers :-)

[1] Of course, these aren't only the student machines and,
    of course, you could just build many subnets that don't
    share their file systems, but actually it turned out
    that it is very convenient to have it that way.

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