Agree that you can do most things in Linux that you can do in MS,
but there are some limitations.
OpenOffice is very good, but I found when collaborating with others,
especially on Word documents, that the review features didn't translate
well; that may be improved in recent versions.
I lived with VMWare for a year, but felt like I had to maintain
two OSes on one machine, and performance was slow.
Just my 2 cents.
Neil Shephard wrote:
OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) is exceptionally useful if you
still have to work with Excel files (there are also other options such
as GNUmeric (http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ and others).
In fact for almost any application under Windows there is an equivalent
for GNU/Linux, many are still in development and might not have every
single feature of the Windows type (e.g. GIMP is a good alternative to
Photoshop, but doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the later),
but you shouldn't struggle for functionality under GNU/Linux. As the
Excel example deomnstrates there are often several projects that seek to
develop the same app independantly giving you as the end user the choice.
If you really need a windows app then you have two choices to run it
under GNU/Linux...
a) Use an emulator such as WINE (http://www.winehq.org/)
b) Use a virtual machine such as VMware to run windows within GNU/Linux
(you can of course do the reverse and run GNU/Linux under VMware on
Windows).
Neil
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