[ Thanks to Tom
Adelstein for this link. ]
Jos Visser has put together an very good series on living
without Windows. He’s written 16 articles in the series.
“As I left my new house in a desolate ‘polder’ in the
Netherlands, I saw a bright white light beam down from the sky, and
a thundering voice spoke to me in a strange, but not unfamiliar,
tongue. Then, all went blue and as soon as I regained conciousness
it dawned on me that I had been given a mission: to try and ‘Live
without Windows’. Not one for careful contemplation, I immediately
removed Windows from my laptop and installed Linux.”
“Unfortunately, we live in a Windows world. Almost all of my
collegues, co-workers, friends and customers use Windows and, more
importantly, Windows applications. They insist on storing stuff on
NT servers, print via NT print servers and sending me files created
with Windows applications. I regularly need to be able to retrieve,
read and print these files. Can I survive just running Linux? What
problems will I run into? Would I still be able to interoperate
with others in any meaningful way?”
“In any case, there is no turning back now. My hard disk has
been cleansed and I am writing this in the Netscape HTML Composer
running under SuSE Linux 5.3. The next few months will be
interesting times as I have decided to go on Living without
Windows!”
“In this series of articles, you can read about my experiences
as I move between the great unwashed and try to interoperate with
them. What problems have I run into? How did I solve them? Whom
have I turned over to the true belief?”