I'll make you folks a deal.... If you can arrange for me to get an old but still functioning laptop as a donation (I'm a starving artist), I'll use it to experiment with totally Libre software and see if we can turn all of these arguments into some real (if small) steps. My wife can serve as a test subject; she is a public school art teacher with moderate computer literacy, and two of her big ongoing frustrations are the slow performance and frequent hangups of our six-year-old Windblows XP Professional (ha-ha) desktop. If I can demonstrate to her an absolutely Libre environment that consistently runs more swiftly and reliably than MicroSlob, she is in a position to spread the word to people who can do something--starting with her brother, who serves on the local school board. If this goes well, a whole school district could eventually be brought from Windblows Prison to the Land of Freedom. But I can't experiment on our current home hardware. Anybody want to provide evidence of how a *genuine* community works and send me a machine?
Joel
