Positive outcomes from migration ordeal

If you’ve been following my last few posts, you know my wife and I have had quite a time of it switching my parents-in-law to something other than Windows. We were originally thinking Mac, but even Ubuntu doesn’t give them everything they need. In the end, because of one website my mother-in-law uses a lot, they are buying a Windows license. My wife had suggested maybe getting Vista, but the hardware additions to make it usable would have been too much extra expense on top of what we’d already spent.

A few good things did come out of it, though:

  • My parents-in-law got exposed to something other than Windows. Windows isn’t inherently bad, but people should know there are other options out there, especially if they can’t troubleshoot Windows problems. In the end, both of them actually took quite a liking to Mac OS X, despite their general comfort with the familiarity of Windows and the need for that poorly designed real estate website.
  • Right now my parents-in-law are using Ubuntu. Until they actually go out and purchase and install Windows, Ubuntu’s IEs4Linux still works better with the real estate website than IEs4Linux on Mac OS X. They’re not going to “convert” to Ubuntu or use it long-term, but at least they know Linux isn’t a scary thing. It’s all about exposure. Baby steps. Plant the seed.
  • My wife finally has a grasp of how terrible vendor lock-in is and how important free software is. That isn’t going to stop her from using Mac OS X or Adobe CS3. She needs those to make a living (no, she’s not going to do her professional graphic design stuff with GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, and F4L). But she did seem a bit more receptive to my explanations about trying to strike a balance between short-term “just works” and long-term “lets me do what I want.” I think she now has a better grasp on why I use Ubuntu. I’m not a Stallman-esque saint when it comes to Free software (I have my Flash player and MP3 codecs installed), but I do try to use FLOSS whenever possible.
  • I’m reminded once again how much a pain it is to install Windows and reinstall Windows. Sometimes Windows recognized the internet connection. Sometimes it didn’t. Unlike our Windows XP at home, the one at my parents-in-law’s wouldn’t do well with multiple partitions. If I tried to resize the partition to make a separate documents partition, Windows wouldn’t boot any more. Never mind how long Windows takes to install (and that it comes with virtually no productivity software)—most annoying of all, that it keeps asking you questions every ten minutes or so. You can’t even answer four or five questions and then walk away and come back later. You have to babysit the installation.
  • We can wipe our hands clean. I’m generally not of the “If you continue to use Windows, I won’t support you any more” camp, but in this case, my wife and I have had to troubleshoot my parents-in-law’s Windows problems so often that we’re just tired of it, and we let them know: “Fine. Use Windows for that real estate website. If you have any future Windows problems, though, we won’t fix them for you. We’ll support only Mac or Ubuntu.” At a certain point you have to draw the line, especially if people insist on running Windows as administrator instead of limited user.

It’s been a learning experience for sure, but some good did come out of it.

4 comments

  1. You’re nuts. How can you say that Windows comes with no productivity software? I mean, everybody uses WordPad and saves their work in Word 6.0 files, right?

    As for not being Stallman-esque, I’m in the same position you are. However, I’m starting to think that Stallman’s zealotry is a carefully thought out strategy: it moves the center towards freedom (that way, we can say “I’m no RMS” to fend off the zealotry charges). By his aggresive promotion of software freedom, our moderate position becomes much more socially acceptable.

  2. Aleajandro Says:

    You’re nuts. How can you say that Windows comes with no productivity software? I mean, everybody uses WordPad and saves their work in Word 6.0 files, right?

    Wordpad – a productivity software? You would call Paint a professional graphics suite then?
    I mean the programs bundled with Windows like Wordpad are limited and do not satisfy an average user’s need. On the other hand in Ubuntu there is OpenOffice.org which is more than capable software.

  3. Yes, I was being sarcastic. The presence of software such as Wordpad or Paint in Windows has puzzled me for years, as Microsoft won’t even support some of them properly (I wonder if there’s any current software that’ll open .wri files from MS Write, Wordpad’s predecessor (included in Windows 3.x).

    My experience is the same as Ubuntucat’s: Installing Ubuntu from scratch requires a few tweaks, but doing the same with Windows requires installing tons of software (a decent browser, office suite, antivirus, firewall, spyware protection, drivers). Most Linux distros are far more useful out of the box than Windows.

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