11-28-2019, 08:18 AM
I wondered if members might weigh in on this question:
I met the new IT person at an NGO here in South Africa. The NGO allows me to use their facilities whereby I may bring my study group youth to access the internet and have a nice, safe place to study, research, etc at no fee. It is wonderful and saves me buying data for internet activities.
The NGO currently uses windows based software both for their admin people as well as on their computers that they use to deliver a basic computer skills course. I am unsure of the specific items on which they instruct their students, however it is basic stuff like word and excel, cutting and pasting, etc.
Because of the cost of the Windows licenses the IT person has suggested to the CEO that they consider an open source operating system and interestingly several of their admin people are already using Libre Office. The CEO is against switching despite the savings as he feels that "we cannot teach the computer course on a system that the students will not encounter in the workplace". For example would they understand how to use Excel if they were using a Linux base OS, in other words how easily transferable would the skills be from say Linux to Windows..?
So I am wondering what comments/opinions Forum members might have about this situation?
I met the new IT person at an NGO here in South Africa. The NGO allows me to use their facilities whereby I may bring my study group youth to access the internet and have a nice, safe place to study, research, etc at no fee. It is wonderful and saves me buying data for internet activities.
The NGO currently uses windows based software both for their admin people as well as on their computers that they use to deliver a basic computer skills course. I am unsure of the specific items on which they instruct their students, however it is basic stuff like word and excel, cutting and pasting, etc.
Because of the cost of the Windows licenses the IT person has suggested to the CEO that they consider an open source operating system and interestingly several of their admin people are already using Libre Office. The CEO is against switching despite the savings as he feels that "we cannot teach the computer course on a system that the students will not encounter in the workplace". For example would they understand how to use Excel if they were using a Linux base OS, in other words how easily transferable would the skills be from say Linux to Windows..?
So I am wondering what comments/opinions Forum members might have about this situation?