A customer came in today with a problem. Her entire system was wiped out and she had no OS disks. I spent about 5 or so minutes with her explaining the concepts and ideas behind Linus/OSS. She seemed interested and because we sell Mandrake I took her over to look at it.
She was quite impressed and when I mentioned the learning curve would be about the difference between going from Win98 to WinXP. She was all for it until she said, "I have a bunch of software already bought, Will It work?" Her inventory included Photoshop, CorelDraw, FrontPage and a few other power tools like that. I explained that there are free/inexpensive options in Linxland. I also mentioned things like WINE and what have you for allowing some programs to work (but not 100%). You could tell she was a bit upset when she realized she had no choice (at least right now) but to shag out the $300 for WinXP Home. But I gave her the URL for CLUG and told her to check it out. She said she definitely would. Please be nice to her and try to make her feel welcome. I don't even know her name but in light of some of the trash talk that has been on the list lately I just wanted to ask people to mind their P & Q's. I know I will be watching mine. Regards, Cameron Nikitiuk
