Hi Chris,
We have plenty of people at work who use a Linux desktop (you can actually chose any free OS that you like although we sys-admins won't support it if it breaks), the only reason that someone gets a Windowz box is if they need to run apps that aren't available for Linux, unfortunatly the proliferation of M$ office documents from clients means that people have to run M$ doze and office.
Anyway I have given some thoughts on your points below.
Chris Allen wrote:
Browsing the web:
Opera - lots of bugs, the most annoying of which is that the toolbars won't stay put between sessions
Netscape - Soooo slow..
I find netscape is plenty fast enough, except when a page has Java in it (then netscape will either crash or slow right down)
Email:
Sylpheed is the only program I have found that comes close to Eudora in functionality - and this doesn't display HTML emails (which I get heaps of from clients)
Netscape mail should be OK with html, although I use pine and that displays html mail properly and does lots of other things i need.
Usenet news:
PAN - not as polished as Agent but no real complaints here
I use netscape for this, although there are many good command line packages.
Office Apps:
Star Office? - So slow even on a 500Mhz PIII that it makes windows look fast.
How much memory does the machine have? as we have 30 people using Star Office OK in 128Mb but if you give your machine 256Mb it should run loads better as it is a bit of a memory hog (as should netscape)
All our office machines (both doze and linux) are celeron based with ~128Mb ram and they all work fine for the majority of users. I am perfectly productive doing things that you would normally do with windows but I do spend most of my time looking after Unix servers so this is probably a bit biased.
Adam