Moving to Linux: slow-go or rip-and-replace?

@CP hardy har * 500 :D

On a more serious note, I've found that this slow-go or rip-and-replace choice is much like learning to swim... or even learning most other things for that matter. Once the skills are learned and sufficiently practiced, the differences between, say, a 50yd non-racing swim and a 500yd non-racing swim become trivial.

The slow-go method seems to me to work best for swimming and for learning more involved, complicated computer tasks. You start with your toe in the water, you progress to those arm-floats for wading in the kiddy pool (if you're an infant!) or staying in the shallow-end if your a child++, you then practice how to breathe and practice the swimming arm strokes and kicking, and then finally you put it together to actually swim. You swim in the shallow-end first, and then only _afterwords_ swim in the deep end. Almost the exact type of progression in going from a computer newbie to a power-user!

The rip-and-replace method can also be called Going Off the Deep End / "jump into the deep end" as applied to swimming. When you jump into the Deep End (or are pushed in!) , you either sink maybe rescued -OR- you swim; appropriately called the Sink-or-Swim method of learning. If someone fails royally during learning more complicated computer tasks via the rip-and-replace method, then that person has effectively Gone Off the Deep End and has Sunk, and even if rescued, that person will continue to get discouraged evermore by repeated learning tasks.

OTOH, for simple computer tasks, the rip-and-replace method doesn't even HAVE such a Sink-or-Swim problem. Ripping out Microsoft Office and replacing this with Open Office Writer as Christian Einfeldt did here is probably much much more easy than replacing an OS, or maybe even easier than "Going back and forth between to OS's".

So choosing the Going Off the Deep End method vs the slow-go method is never completely a cut-and-dry clear choice for everyone, even for moving from M$blows to Linux. My 2c++ here.