[CS-FSLUG] Interesting from a SUSE elist.

[Josiah Ritchie]

On Wed, 2005-01-26 at 05:20 -0500, Fred A. Miller wrote:
> > On Tuesday 25 January 2005 03:05, Ben Higginbottom wrote:
> > <snip>
> > > The last I heared was that it was still going ahead but at a slower rate.
> > <snip>
> > 
> >  You're right.  I just got done reading an article about Munich's migration 
> > and it's going to be a slow one, due to be completed in 2008.
> 
> Belive me for an install base as large as Munich's (14,000 IIRC) a 4 year 
> migration isnt at all slow. IBM is looking at probably a minimum of 5 years 
> to migrate all 200,000 desktops, longer if they port all their software 
> suites. Novell switched to a dual boot system and OOo last summer and will 
> have migrated to NLD fully by the end of this summer, which I thought was 
> amazingly quick.
> 
> Trinity is looking at a 3 - 4 year migration, we went dual boot with win98 
> over the summer and ironing out all the major issues with the clients took us 
> through to October, when they start being used for formal lessons within the 
> next few weeks I'm sure a whole load of other issues will crop up as well.
> 
> Making the clients look right is also amazingly difficult, slight style 
> differences can cause all kinds of issues, such as single clicking on a 
> directory/folder to open it or clicking on the title bar causing it to shade 
> as opposed to go fullscreen can cause a casual user to get worried. Were 
> using KDE3 with Plastik to give it the windows look, but when I was setting 
> up the desktop due to my years of using CDE or XFCE or similar I put all the 
> launchers on the kicker as opposed to icons on the desktop which threw people 
> initially because they were so used to icons being on the desktop.
> 
> The second hardest thing is convincing people that linux != windows in any 
> shape or form, its something completley different, and approaching it with a 
> windows mindset is liable to lead to disaster.
> 
> We've also had to factor in time for the teachers to learn not only linux, but 
> the other apps they would be using such as OOo. Theres also a not 
> inconsiderable number of kids who have been using Linux for a few or more 
> years who are practically salivating at the chance of getting one over on 
> teach with their 133t sk1llz, which is yet another thing to factor in and 
> build safeguards against.
> 
> Finally there are the kids who have started their GCSE preperations. Its 
> totally unfair on them to expect them to jump to another OS when they have 
> much more important things on their minds. Not to mention that we couldnt 
> find them a suitable database client/tool in time, hopefully those who will 
> be starting their GCSE's in september will be able to use Base in OOo2, so 
> long as OOo2 is finished in time and the relevant teachers can get familar 
> with it. Which means that we'll be able to defenestrate ourselves (should the 
> bosses want that) by the earliest September 2007.
> 
> Belive me any large scale desktop conversion is far, far from a walk in the 
> park, but on the upside you do get to have kids come and complain that Gnome 
> isnt installed, and get to tell them it never will be due to the lack of 
> lockdown options :)

This is well stated and full of truth. Even a windows to windows
migration can be real hard simply due to training issues.

JSR/