Hi ….<evil bashing mode on>
I’ve been using linux on my work laptop for the last 6 months….I’m now running Windows XP again…..Why?
Let’s talk about why. I work in a pretty large enviroment. I work with 10′s of terminal windows and other programs running. At work we have a exchange mailbox. We use exchange for meeting requests, address books and other things. My mailbox is large….that is also a thing i cannot change …i get alot of mail…lucky me.
My BIGGEST problem is a very simple one. I cannot figure out why this is still a problem. At work i have a dock for my IBM Thinkpad T60 laptop. There i have my 19″ LCD monitor & keyboard/mouse. When i come to work i put my laptop in my dock and resume from sleep…..When i run Windows. When i run linux, sure…i can suspend/sleep my laptop….but if i dare to suspend with both my monitors active in Xorg and go home i wake up my laptop im in for a huge surprise…a bad one. The ATI driver does not seem to like it when you unplug a external monitor. Atleast when i suspend at home and come back to work and dock my thinkpad and start it up again i have to logout ad log back in to get my 2nd monitor working again …WHY IS THIS?!?!?!?!…..COME THE **** on ……this is one of the features business users NEED to have…..I dont want to shut all my programs down when i go home or to work …i want to be able to just open my laptop and start working, wherever i am at that time.
Email……..Evolution with the exchange-connector is not the greatest thing. It’s not the fault of the Evolution team, they are doing a awesome job. It is probably because of the fact that the Exchange protocol is a closed one….the exchange-connector uses the web interface of the Exchange server to connect to your inbox. My inbox is around 1Gb with shitload of mail….dont tell me to archive it……i want to have my mail online thank you very much. I try to keep it under 1Gb. When i start evolution it takes around 10 minutes from the time i start it and until i can actually read some mail. It sometimes gives me errors about the backend server not responding etc….again this is probably due to the fact that the exchange protocol is a closed one and i am probably just a evil man for keeping such a large mailbox but this is unacceptable for me. I tried using thunderbird and imap for awile but it was slow and painful …..And i had no-luck when i tried to get my mail offline….everytime i started Evolution again it just kept saying it wanted to download my mailbox …over&over again.
OpenOffice: I got a report from Brocade the other day from a health check i ran on a large SAN fabric. I opened the xls file in OpenOffice and god …it took around 10 minutes to open. I opened the same file a virtual machine running Microsoft Windows XP & Office 2007 and it took nearly 10 seconds ….Again this might be a problem that needs some opening of file types from Microsoft to solve.
The first two problems are probably the biggest problems i have with linux on the desktop. If ATI could fix the horrible problem i have with my X.org and if Microsoft would open up the exchange protocol and my Evolution client would be snappy as Outlook with my lovely mailbox it would be nice. I understand that the problem with Evolution and OpenOffice are just because of vendor lock-in but that does not matter to me. I just need to get some work done. I do not have time to wait for OpenOffice or Evolution to open ….my time is very limited ….those who know me are probably smiling when they reads this 
….
Well ….now i’ve gotten my anger out for the day …im going back to my Microsoft Windows workstation to do some work …on some linux servers….ironic isnt it .
Laters,
Finnzi
…not enough power!!