{"id":105,"date":"2007-06-17T13:25:23","date_gmt":"2007-06-17T13:25:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntucat.wordpress.com\/2007\/06\/17\/positive-outcomes-from-migration-ordeal\/"},"modified":"2007-06-17T13:25:23","modified_gmt":"2007-06-17T13:25:23","slug":"positive-outcomes-from-migration-ordeal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/positive-outcomes-from-migration-ordeal\/","title":{"rendered":"Positive outcomes from migration ordeal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;d already spent. <\/p>\n<p> A few good things did come out of it, though: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> <b>My parents-in-law got exposed to something other than Windows.<\/b> Windows isn&#8217;t inherently bad, but people should know there <i>are<\/i> other options out there, especially if they can&#8217;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.\n<li><b>Right now my parents-in-law are using Ubuntu<\/b>. Until they actually go out and purchase and install Windows, Ubuntu&#8217;s IEs4Linux still works better with the real estate website than IEs4Linux on Mac OS X. They&#8217;re not going to &#8220;convert&#8221; to Ubuntu or use it long-term, but at least they know Linux isn&#8217;t a scary thing. It&#8217;s all about exposure. Baby steps. Plant the seed.\n<li><b>My wife finally has a grasp of how terrible vendor lock-in is and how important free software is.<\/b> That isn&#8217;t going to stop her from using Mac OS X or Adobe CS3. She needs those to make a living (no, she&#8217;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 &#8220;just works&#8221; and long-term &#8220;lets me do what I want.&#8221; I think she now has a better grasp on why I use Ubuntu. I&#8217;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.\n<li><b>I&#8217;m reminded once again how much a pain it is to install Windows and reinstall Windows.<\/b> Sometimes Windows recognized the internet connection. Sometimes it didn&#8217;t. Unlike our Windows XP at home, the one at my parents-in-law&#8217;s wouldn&#8217;t do well with multiple partitions. If I tried to resize the partition to make a separate documents partition, Windows wouldn&#8217;t boot any more. Never mind how long Windows takes to install (and that it comes with virtually <i>no<\/i> productivity software)&mdash;most annoying of all, that it keeps asking you questions every ten minutes or so. You can&#8217;t even answer four or five questions and then walk away and come back later. You have to babysit the installation.\n<li><b>We can wipe our hands clean<\/b>. <a href=\"http:\/\/ubuntuforums.org\/showthread.php?t=450454\">I&#8217;m generally not of the &#8220;If you continue to use Windows, I won&#8217;t support you any more&#8221; camp<\/a>, but in this case, my wife and I have had  to troubleshoot my parents-in-law&#8217;s Windows problems so often that we&#8217;re just tired of it, and we let them know: &#8220;Fine. Use Windows for that real estate website. If you have any future Windows problems, though, we won&#8217;t fix them for you. We&#8217;ll support only Mac or Ubuntu.&#8221; At a certain point you have to draw the line, especially if people insist on running Windows as administrator instead of limited user.<\/ul>\n<p> It&#8217;s been a learning experience for sure, but some good did come out of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;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&#8217;t give them everything they need. In the end, because of one website my mother-in-law uses a lot,&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/positive-outcomes-from-migration-ordeal\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Positive outcomes from migration ordeal<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}