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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

Are the majority of jobs really for Microsoft products. I am surprised.

The dull ones, mostly.

That said, the company I work for has an IT department that is not happy at all to issue non-windows boxes for employees. You can have one, but then you will have to manage it yourself. We have a couple Windows servers but all our software run on *nix-ish boxes.

At least I could install cygwin and X on top of XP.

"You can have one, but then you will have to manage it yourself."

You say that like it's a bad thing ...

Depending on what you have to do, it's not, but I have to edit documents that live in a sharepoint server a couple times a week and I never quite figured out how to do that without a Windows box. That and exchange managing our e-mail makes moving my corporate-issued computer out of Windows somewhat risky career-wise.

Believe-me, I have meditated on this more than once.

You can access basic IMAP from an Exchange server. I was using thunderbird at my last job and it worked fine. Connecting to the LDAP server for the global address book took a bit to figure out. I finally got it all connected and figured out though. If your Exchange usage is more than email and shared addresses I don't know how much further you can get into it without Outlook. Not because it's impossible only because I didn't try to do it.

As far a sharepoint goes I don't have any real experience with it but it looks like you are able to use it on linux but the activex controls will not work(of course):

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx

Sadly, we use Exchange for corporate calendar and contacts. Evolution sort of works, but I have seen it refusing to connect or update stuff more than once.

Had I sufficient memory (machine has 1 GB of RAM), I would go down the VirtualBox/VMWare route.

Could you not run Windows in a VM?

When I switched to OS X from a Windows workstation at my job, I used VMWare Converter to convert my workstation to a VM and it worked flawlessly.

The machine I have has one 1 GB of memory. I could run Windows under a VM, but that would consume precious resources for the "good side". There is a lot of "heavy" stuff being done in IE (ActiveX for Project and so on).

Yeah, that's a good reason not to, especially if you will need to have your Windows VM running constantly. RAM limitations was why I never tried running Linux as main OS and Windows in a VM on my previous workstation. I had 2GB but that was already being stretched thin by running Eclipse and Visual Studio at the same time.

"The dull ones, mostly."

This is what PG described as "Microsoft is dead".

I work in a university department and the situation is exactly the opposite. When a new grad student arrives, they're set up with a Scientific Linux machine (a version of RHEL modified by CERN and Fermilab).

My feeling is that a lot of science jobs will rely on the Linux/Unix platform. Backend or system control type things are on Linux and a lot of personal computers are OS X.

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