Screenshot

1. Some people never get the software installed properly, and so get poor results, particularly with respect to screen graphics. Linux is actually easier and quicker to install than something like Windows 2000, but the people who make graphics boards for PCs generally optimize them for Microsoft's approach to font and window management, not for the X/PDS stuff that's standard on all Unix variants including Linux.
   
   The Linux install programs are, of course, designed with this problem in mind but there are lots of unusual combinations of monitor, graphics processor, graphics memory, and graphics ROM code that need special tweaking to run exactly right. On these the standard install programs may therefore produce less than optimal results.
   
   That's usually easy to fix -- if you're an expert; but a first time user may take the default results as typical of Linux or, at least, as the best his hardware can produce, and so end up with a system that limps when it should fly.
   
   
2. There are some things, particularly games, that simply don't work at all; while others don't work as well, or in the same way as they do on your office system.
   
   These differences often become focal points for user frustration with Linux if those users don't get offsetting social or other personal benefits. Those come naturally as you learn a bit about what can be done with Linux and experiment with it, but a lot of people don't do that. Instead they set themselves up to fail by seeing Linux at home as merely cheaper than Windows at home when, in fact, they should be motivating themselves to succeed with it by seeing it as smarter.
   
   
3. You will come under social pressure, not just from the Windows bigots at work, but from people like web site operators who rely on extensions unique to IE or dot.net and so treat Linux users as second class citizens. There's not much you can do about them, except maybe run IE (which is possible) or you can do what I do: recognize that less than one third of web servers worldwide run Microsoft IIS and just say no. There are lots of other people who value your time and business higher than these wingots do.
   
   
4. In some circumstances your use of Linux at home to work on office documents could expose you to being unfairly, and incorrectly, accused of compromising office network security.

Or, you can just use Microsoft's product. Microsoft has not announced plans to sell Office for Linux although it does sell licenses for the BSD Unix variant forming the basis for Apple's new MacOS X and you have to think that porting it from there to Linux would be utterly trivial.

You should know, however, that most Windows applications, including Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc can be licensed and run under Linux:

1. through use of an emulator like Netraverse's Win4Lin which lets you run a Microsoft operating system, and thus its applications, in a normal Linux window just like any other Linux application;
   
2. through products, like the stuff from CodeWeavers, which let you run many Microsoft applications, including the Office suite, as native Linux processes without having to license a Microsoft OS; or,
   
3. through use of Linux distributions, like that from Xandros specifically tailored to make loading and running Microsoft applications like Word a snap.

For some users staying with Word, at least temporarily, may make sense. People are working on automatically converting macros and programmed tables from Microsoft Office to products like StarOffice and back, but it's not really there yet and those who rely on these facilities should probably stay with Word until it is.