Need an OS for my pc!! !!

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If you've been using Windows since day 1, using Windows is obviously easier than moving to a new system. That just goes without saying.






You're right, the UI is completely different...



But finding alternate programs for everything you do and getting your data transferred (depending on how you're doing it, of course) can be troublesome when switching to a new OS. When you're moving to a new version of the same OS, then you're fine once the makers of your programs sort out any compatibility problems which may exist (I've only seen very few in OS X myself).



What I actually said was that I preferred MS Office to OO. I made it clear it was just my opinion. I never said any of the words you're putting in my mouth. You're the one making brash statements of opinion as if they were fact, going on about what's "better".



Yeah, the start menu looks completely different! How did anyone cope?

Dunno what you think those pics demonstrate. The panel in GNOME does not behave in the same way as the Apple Menu, nor does it even fulfill the same function. In terms of function, it is more analogous to the Dock, but in form it is obviously quite different from the Dock. It really is closer to the Windows Taskbar than it is to anything in OS X.


Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice are everywhere. If someone had previously been using IE, Outlook, and MS Office, then the transition is a little more jarring, but still a change for the better.


In regards to statistical functions, my claim is an objective fact. Excel sucks at statistics, very very badly. It has a large number of known and egregious mistakes that have gone uncorrected since the 90s.

It's a menu with your programs on it, whereas the Apple menu is a menu with some options on it. Basically, GNOME is the same layout as OS X, but with accommodations for a lack of any dock (unless you feel like installing one).



The only one of those three programs in mainstream use is Firefox, and it's only a "change for the better" in your opinion.



I'm sure, if it was as bad as you're making out, it wouldn't be nearly as popular in businesses as it is today.

The menu bar at the top of the Apple desktop environment does the same stuff as the bar that is displayed at the top of individual windows in both GNOME and Windows. The GNOME panel has an applications menu, which is essentially a better-organized version of the Start menu in Windows. The System and Places menus perform the same function as the side panel in the Windows start menu. The abilities of the panel more closely match those of the Windows taskbar. The GNOME interface, to the extent it matches either big proprietary interface, is closer to Windows than to OS X. Your only basis for claiming that GNOME is the same as OS X is that GNOME defaults to having a panel in the same place where OS X puts the Apple menu, and that's just completely ridiculous.


I've watched Excel generate negative r^2 values. That means they don't even use the correct formula for something as basic as calculating r^2 on a regression curve. And when Excel does regression curves, it universally does them worse than LibreOffice Calc or Gnumeric does, because again, it uses the wrong formula.

I do use Linux, so I know how GNOME works thank you very much. But wouldn't you agree that, at the end of the day, most UIs are similar anyway? I mean, there are only so many ways you can change the look of a file manager or an applications menu. Apple put the list of apps on the dock, whereas GNOME has it on a menu at the top. And so on. Things are in different places, of course, but the general layout is often quite similar because you can't derive from that basic format without making it unintuitive and complicated.



Again, if it was that bad in real world use, businesses wouldn't use it.

You're assuming the very best practices and technical expertise. The truth is that Excel is part of the MS Office suite that businesses get volume deals on along with perks like free "tech support". The businesses are lured in by the perceived economic efficiency, not the quality of the software. This free "tech support" lunch is a major cash cow in the tech industry that roots itself in the technological illiteracy of the market. That's why Microsoft gets all the government software contracts.

I'm well aware of this, but if the software was of such low quality it couldn't do common forumulas, there'd be a lot more complaining and Microsoft would have fixed the issues, when instead, businesses use it without any issue, and have done for ages. Even though they use MS stuff for the support and cheap business contracts, they wouldn't renew those contracts and keep using new versions of Office if the software wasn't fit for purpose.

Unless you go to a tiling window manager like Awesome, yeah. But then your original claim doesn't make sense. Anyways, of the major GUIs, OS X diverges the most from the basic form of the others. I would think a Windows user would have at least as easy a time adjusting to GNOME as a Mac user would.


1) Often the primary use of Excel is not statistical work but other stuff, and people who use it for occasional casual statistical work won't notice the failings. But having it in place is going to be bad, because if it is used for all spreadsheet work it will be the first place people go when they need stats done, not realizing that they are getting incorrect output.
2) Aside from the most dramatic failures, few non-statisticians would reasonably catch on to the mistakes at all unless they were checking it against the output of a real statistical package like R, SAS, etc. Most people fail to sanity-check the results computer programs give them, much less check for smaller (but still serious) errors.
3) The people who make purchasing decisions for big corporations are not the ones who have to use the software, and they certainly are not the ones who have any amount of technical knowledge whatsoever.
4) Inertia, and the lock-up of data in Microsoft's proprietary file formats. The company my dad works for (a very large multinational) got sick of MS's pricing a few years ago, and the only reason they didn't switch to OpenOffice.org was because some of the old files would not open properly. This was back in the OOo2.4 days; if they tried it now with LibreOffice 3.3 those files would almost certainly open, but corporations don't operate like that and assume that the software now is the same as it was last time they tried.

You're empirically wrong. The fact that Excel is a steaming pile of crap is well-documented. How it manages to still be used is a separate question, but objective measurements of how well it handles statistical functions show that it fares poorly against the competition.

I'm still awestruck that you're able to defend the quality of OpenOffice, a feat that's been abandoned by almost everyone else. But then your use case scenarios may not be typical - I'm not surprised Excel sucks at statistical modeling, don't use it for that. Therein lies the trouble with the MS model, it's not the most flexible of tools. But for what most people need it for, it gets the job done cheaply (time is far more expensive than a software license) and effectively.

Linux

I'd suggest Windows XP, or Linux Mint.
Linux Mint is 100% free, and it's easier for most Windows users to use Mint instead of the other Linux OS'es good luck

Not it isn't. It installs a relatively large amount of proprietary software by default. It is, however, very easy to use, and so not a bad choice for a beginning Linux user.

Well, if you have unlimited internet like me it's free...
Sorry, I forget that some people can have from 2GB internet to - 20GB Internet.

I didn't mean free as in cost. It is not "100% free" in that it contains non-free (closed-source) software.