Ease of use
With the machine set up, what was the experience of working with it over an extended period? Surprisingly unremarkable, actually -- which is in itself rather remarkable. Most of the time, it didn't seem to matter that we were using Linux and not Windows, since everything worked more or less in the expected way.
However, over time a few annoying quirks did begin to show up. Individually, they made little impact on productivity, but taken together they made us question just how easy it would be to migrate to Linux desktops en masse.
Most of these quirks were minor. For example, there were difficulties cutting and pasting text to and from Mozilla. This can be seriously frustrating for online editorial staff, whose jobs tend, sadly, to involve lots of cutting and pasting to and from Web browsers. The problem seemed to be solvable by reloading in Mozilla or restarting the browser, but this way madness lies.
We also found the personal information management (PIM) tools flawed, at least when used with a Palm. We could not get KDE's address-book tool to display all the needed fields for some entries. KDE's Palm synchronisation tool worked well, but there was no evident way of editing Palm memo entries -- a significant omission. Of course, in the open-source world nearly anything can be accomplished with enough tinkering, but mainstream business users are unlikely to have the time, inclination or technical ability to tinker.
The only major roadblock we came up against was transferring files to or from the office server over the LAN browser, which runs on a technology called Samba that communicates with Windows networks. Samba had difficulty navigating the way permissions were set up on the network, and was unable to authorise us to read or write files on the server, although we were able to browse the network. After much tinkering, it appeared that the solution would be to change the way the network's permissions were set up -- something many companies would find unacceptable.
This was the only stumbling block that prevented us from getting work done, but it is a serious flaw. The quick-moving open source community may soon solve the problem, but that will not be good enough for companies wishing to install Linux desktops today. It's worth noting that Apple, with its Unix-based Mac OS X, has already implemented a working solution to this problem -- OS X had no trouble browsing the office network and reading and writing files.
Samba acquitted itself better when we tried sharing files. In the file browser, you can right-click any folder and set it as a shared folder. We were able to share files between Linux and Windows desktops using this method. However, this also presented some mysteries: for example, the shared Linux machine was not visible on the network, and could only be found by performing a search.
Conclusions
In a real-world production environment, we found that SuSE Linux Desktop worked surprisingly well, and supplied all the software needed in a typical office. In fact, some of the software was better than its Windows equivalents, such as the XMMS media player, which imitates WinAmp but is somewhat easier to use. In general, we did not find using Linux in a Windows-centric environment to be a handicap, which is saying a lot.
However, the problems we did come across (particularly the apparent limitations of Samba), and the amount of tinkering required to solve them, raised serious doubts about recommending Linux for widespread office use just yet.
SuSE Linux Desktop
Company: SuSE Australia
Price: Varies, starting from AU$299 w/o support contract
Phone: 02 9439 4394
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