At well over 300 talkbacks and counting, plenty of folks took my challenge (and my reader’s challenge) to sort out just what it would take to switch from Windows to desktop Linux. Obviously, there was plenty of the standard Windows vs. Linux bickering, but there were also a lot of well-thought out responses.

Here are the highlights from the talkbacks, though, with some important considerations. None of these seem to be deal breakers, but they certainly need to be part of a well-planned and successful conversion if we decide to head down that road:

- Printing: Do all of the printers we access have Linux drivers? As much as we might want to be paperless, the super’s office, perhaps more than any other district administrative unit, must produce printed documents.

- Backup: With our Windows machines, we can redirect desktops and user folders to a regularly backed-up server; Vista does a particularly nice (if slow) job of dealing with offline file synchronization. There are plenty of ways to handle this in Linux.

More here