Rewriting the question
Kirrily Robert writes about OS switching and the XY problem and gets it right. Partly.
I’ve been through this process of OS switching a few times too. OS/2 to Windows, Windows to FreeBSD, FreeBSD to Solaris, Solaris to Mac, and more recently Mac to Windows.
Sometimes when a person asks “how can I run Word on Linux?” they mean “how can I read Word documents I’ve already written, those others are going to send me, and also write new documents without feeling an uncontrollable urge to gouge my eyes out with a spoon because the available MS Office clones on Linux are pretty dire?”.
Sometimes a person might ask “can I run iTunes on Linux?” because they actually like iTunes and find the alternatives available on Linux to be one or all of unstable, incomplete, or baroque.
And despite my prior strong bias against Outlook, having accepted my fate as a person who has to talk to an Exchange server for mail and calendaring, gotten over my special unique snowflakeness, and decided to give it a fair shot: I can see how someone might like it and feel that Evolution is a poor second choice.
None of this is to say that Windows can’t be maddeningly stupid. Microsoft have done an excellent job of building a software ecosystem able to do a really good emulation of a non-deterministic system. But sometimes the reason someone wants to run an application which is not native to Linux is because the ones that are just aren’t up to snuff.
Popularity: 48% [?]
Yeah, you’re not wrong there either.
I must dig up that article of MJD’s about the XY problem, where he talks about the weird convolutions those questions make people go through. I think somewhere in there he talks about the case where people say, “I want to do X, and I’ve already considered W and Q and ruled them out for these reasons. I’m pretty sure I do want to use Y, because [blah blah]. So, can I do that? If so, how?”
Those are a very small subset of XY problems, I think. For every person who really wants to use the full feature-set of Exchange+Outlook, there are dozen people who just want a halfway decent graphical email client.
But it all comes down to actually expressing your needs. If your need is “I need to send and receive email, and I want to be able to drag stuff into folders, see attached images inline, etc” then say so. If your needs are “I need to be able to book shared resources such as meeting rooms via my company’s Exchange calendar” then say that. Don’t just say “I need Outlook.”
A fair point. I think I’ve had enough iterations of “why would you want to use X? This other tool is so much better because it does B, C, and D. You’re an idiot for wanting to do A. The snarling is almost reflexive now.
A certain Usenet-like environment is rife with it.
Glad to see the pingback stuff worked. Still figuring this out as I go along.