[NTLUG:Discuss] RE:

[Aaron Goldblatt]

> would venture to extend the notion of promotion to the migration of users
> from Windows, which in my opinion, is a tremendous hurdle when you consider
> it. 

I would concur.  I myself have only recently concluded my migration from 
Windows to Linux.  The big hurdle in my migration was (get this) email.

I have tens of thousands of emails that previously were stored in Eudora for 
Windows.  Eudora uses mbox format, which makes conversion easy.

The hurdle wasn't moving the files: The hurdle was finding an MUA that met my 
needs.  I wanted:
 - mbox format support, or direct conversion support to the new format
 - Multiple POP3 account support
 - Filtering support of the sort found in Eudora
 - GUI-based was preferable but absolutely not required
 - SMTP or injection into a qmail outbound queue is required

I was willing to accept multiple packages to accomplish these tasks -- 
fetchmail and procmail combined with mutt, for example, but this idea still 
had very serious drawbacks.

Problems I encountered, some of which I've never been able to resolve:
 - Pine's interface.  Yuck.
 - Mutt's configurability is nice, but the documentation is poor (if you're 
new to it)
 - I've never found a regular expression howto or teaching document, so 
things like Procmail (or even grep) are extremely painful for me.

I finally settled on Kmail, from KDE.  But it took me two years of fiddling.  
I always found myself back in Windows because of the email situation I was 
unwilling to compromise about.

<rant>

The migration issue is a Very Big Deal for a lot of people, and I suspect if 
there was more help in overcoming those hurdles on the part of our community, 
we might see more change than we do.  Linux is still considered by the 
unwashed masses to be an operating system for wireheads and geeks, and while 
I sort of like that (and I hate the idea of people too stupid to turn on a 
computer using Linux), I also recognize that the significant hurdles we face 
come from Microsoft's dominance.  We can't simply ignore Microsoft's 
products, if only because we need to teach people how to get away from them.

There was an article on Slashdot (I believe) last week about the biggest 
problem facing open source and free office suite developers: Microsoft 
interoperability.  Perfectly working filters that import and export Microsoft 
Office-formatted data.  That is a huge issue standing in the way of desktop 
migration, even for me.

</rant>

ag