Munich, Germany goes Kubuntu!

[xennex81]

In 1993 the NE adept of Revenue adopted FoxPro and followed it through all of its iterations until VFP 6.0 in 2002, at which time MS turned to .NET and moved VFP their back burner, where it died a slow death. I was tasked with finding a new GUI RAD tool. Rather than .NET I looked at and tested a variety of C, JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP and C+ tools. I chose Qt. I tried to convince TPTB to switch to PostgrSQL, but they wouldn't buy a free DBM because of "no support" since they assumed open source support forums would be worthless. They purchased Oracle. Taxpayers have paid through the nose for it and Oracle's support is so notoriously poor that they rely on the open source forum. In the last ten year millions of dollars could have been saved with no sacrifice in functionality.

You know what the funny thing is. That money went somewhere and it was again spent in the economy. I don't really believe in "savings" of that kind ;-). People got fed by it and not for the worst work. I think usually what we should be after is for money to be spent on useful things, and whether it was wasted is not determined by whether it was spent, but by what it was spent on. Of course, If you feel that the Oracle product was a bad product then it was spent on bad things, but in the same vein, maybe the same money should then simply have been spent on support contracts, in that way, (for PostgreSQL), the money would still have been spent, but it would have contributed to the evolvement of that software. I personally feel if you (as a government organisation) can form well-made ties with such support contract workers (organisations) that it can become a kind of symbiotic relationship that furthers a form of in-house knowledge build-up or development. These contractors are then well-trusted suppliers as a form of perhaps an in-house department or subsidiary. Then they would have become better off in all respects mostly. I would personally have vouched for something like that (not knowing anything about it, of course).

[xennex81]

It wasn't able to, but I was so mad at Microsoft I preferred to move to another product if I was going to have to recode anyway. Plus, REALbasic offered the ability to compile for both Macintosh and Linux. Alas, I never got to the level of skill in it that I had with Visual BASIC, so I mostly just kept coding in VB until Microsoft's newer versions of Windows obsoleted even that. I'm lamenting my decision to learn Visual BASIC instead of C++, as those skills would still serve me now. If anyone had any question as to why I have tremendous disdain for Microsoft, that should answer it. There are other reasons, but that's one of the big ones.

What were your reasons to not go with VB.NET? Personally I have just not had a feeling that I wanted to be married to that kind of thing. I was not objected to developing for the windows platform (I worked in Delphi for quite some time) but when it went .NET I kinda chose for a more open source alternative in that I wanted to keep my eye on simply Java (maybe not open source but cross platform) and I must say I have missed some skill in developing or compiling Windows programs, I am kinda handicapped there currently, for quite some time already.

I also didn't want to get tied to PowerShell for the same reason. These developments have caused me to turn away from the Windows platform as a place for me to develop.

My proficience in shell scripting in Linux currently far far succeeds anything I can do with Windows. As much as I may have complained about Linux here on the forum, when you give me a VI editor and a shell script, I am in heaven. I know ways to improve my shell experience, I might need Python for that. Or at least some ncurses I think. Perl has bindings for that.

There are very few system maintenance tasks (such as file moving/editing/manipulating) that I do in the GUI. Even the plain old Konqueror gives me a better experience than Dolphin. I surely wish to contribute, I would love to do a lot of work. But I still can't. This what I am doing here is all I can do currently. I am writing (Steve, this is what I called a small contribution, which I believe is welcomed here on this forum). And I am grateful that I can write here, to do at least something about my love for Linux.