[airspirit]

This weekend I began turning a business away from the dark side by installing Gentoo in the place of Windows XP on one of the desktops as a test case. I installed the following:

Gentoo w/ win4lin sources
KDE 3.14
Gnome 2.4
LiSA
Everything SAMBA
Crossover Office/Plugin
Win4Lin Workstation 5.0 running WinME (!)
MS Office XP
Assorted proprietary Winblows apps
Mozilla 1.5/Firebird 0.7/Thunderbird
OpenOffice 1.1
CUPS

I installed a KDE Luna theme and mangled the K menu to mimic the Winblows menu almost perfectly. Then I set WinME to open in desktop 4 automagically upon login. Once done, I dragged the owner over and sat him down at the machine to look at my handywork. After about 10 minutes he asked me why the start menu didn't say "Start" anymore ... I kid you not!

Anyway, the guineapig that works at that machine is loving every minute of working on it. He's already gone completely away from IE6 and Outlook and is exlusively using Firebird and Thunderbird. Already we've ported all of his Excel spreadsheets to OpenOffice and he's digging it.

I've already done this at home and I never boot into windows anymore except to play certain games (others I play in the Win4Lin environment with a slight performance hit). The nice thing about Win4Lin is that Linux handles most of the underlying resource handling and now I find it almost impossible to crash WinME (the most crash happy of the Winblows bunch), and it allows me to run most of my Windows only software (the stuff that doesn't work under WINE) without a hitch and with almost no performance penalty. I even have my graphical LCD software working! Of course at home I use XFCE4 (very nice and clean), but it will be a while before I can free my test subject here from desktop icons and a start menu.

Anyway, for those of you that want free of Windows but are still shackled due to one or two irreplacable apps, this may be a solution that works for you. I fully intend on converting every machine to linux over the next few weeks and I can't wait until I can convert over to a strictly linux network. OfficeXP will die at that point (Access is the sticking point now, though I'm working to port everything to MySQL/PHP as fast as I can), and other than a few proprietary Windows apps (irreplacable by ANY linux apps) this store will be a Microsoft-free zone.

Just thought I'd motivate you guys to switch ... it really is rewarding. The nice thing about Gentoo that would cause me to point you that way (if you have the intestinal fortitude to make it through the install) is the sheer amount of customization available, the speed advantage of a machine tailored system, and the ease of upgrades. To upgrade every piece of linuxware on your box all you have to do is open a prompt and enter the following: emerge -u world. The next morning when you wake up you'll have the latest and greatest of everything.