One small business’s year without Windows

I would definitely say that Mepis was the best choice for non-geeks needing to move to Linux. What I thought was interesting was what possessed the business in question to use MS Word when they were already using OO in the first place?

My company, Adams-Blake Co., started its business life on a Macintosh platform and moved to Windows in 1995. By late 2001, administration had gone from a chore to a nightmare. When it was again time to upgrade we decided to change to Linux. We began with Mandrake, then tried Slackware, and now run a few machines with Mepis. We’ve always had a challenge to see if we could not use Windows for an entire year. We’ve never been able to do it — until now.

All of our other business functions are covered with Linux. On the desktop, we use Moneydance for accounting. We use Microsoft Word under the CodeWeavers CrossOver Office, and OpenOffice.org for spreadsheets and presentations. We use the GIMP for graphics and Quanta and Bluefish for editing Web pages. We prepare our payroll with PayCycle. On the server side we keep media lists on MySQL using the phpMyAdmin front end. We wish we had an Access-like front end to MySQL so we could quickly write more complex apps. Finally, we use our own Jaya123 Web service to run order entry, reporting, and invoicing.

However, there was no acceptable way to do taxes on Linux. The software we tried did not run well under CrossOver Office, Wine, or Win2Lin. [Read the rest]