"Gotchas" in Open Source - and a bit More

Nowadays the biggest issue in existance with open source is compatibility. This is not a weakness of open source! Proprietary software and formats insist on making easy money. That is, they insist on selling licenses for everything. As a result, many of the "Microsoft Office compatible" file formats in use by open source programs such as Open Office (and Libre Office) are reverse engineered by necessity. As a result files written with one program may not look the same on another. Formatting may be off and formulas may not work the same in spreadsheets.

By and large, the differences are not major for most non-business users (except maybe in spreadsheets, but I have found 98% of the formulas I use to work equally well when tried on both programs). The key is to simply use the KISS (Keep It Short and Simple) principle. It is easy to foul up anything by making it complicated "just because"! Look at many Powerpoint presentations and you will know what I mean! Just because you can do something does not mean it is intelligent to do it...

As an aside: I found that Open Office Calc can do things Excel can't. A few years ago, in making a spreadsheet to keep track of monthly bills, I wanted to create a sheet for each bill with a color coded front summary sheet. Excel would not allow conditional formatting between sheets while Open Office Calc would. It worked super in Open Office but all Excel could do was whine that it could not support conditional formatting between sheets. I would have had to move the data to the summary sheet I wanted to use for the conditional formatting and hide it then work with it.....way too much work when I only had to reference the sheet and cell in Open Office to get the job done!

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Unless you really need 100% compatibility, you do not need to pay for a license to use a program when open source can do it for free. I have not seen any deal breaker errors opening MS Office documents with Open Office so far.

Remember that you do not own a single program; only a license to use the program within the limits of that license. What you paid for at the store was a pretty box (or so the designers think), cost for making that CD/DVD, store overhead, and, oh yes, that license.

An old no longer valid "gotcha":

In the good old days, you worked Linux with the command line. To rephrase that: In the very, very old days, you worked Linux with the command line. Let's put this in perspective....remember something called MSDOS? That was command line oriented. Nobody complained as we were not made gooey by GUI.

I do not claim to be super geeky, but I personally turn to the command line (Windows calls it the command prompt) in both Linux and in Windows when I want to do certain things quickly. Many things can be done a lot faster via command line vs clicking through windows and menus.

As always, I will be straightening things up on this page as I get ideas and time.