Well, I did it. After my "Linux is not for desktops?" post, I had many messages of advice and suggestions - and I have finally turned off my windows machine for good.
I'm now using:
Mail: mutt - took some getting used to, but I'm now amazed at how powerful it is. I can do things with a couple of keypresses that I wouldn't have considered in Eudora!
News: slrn - Again totally different philosophy to Agent, but well worth the effort... Now all my news is collected by slrnpull, and I can read quickly whenever I want to.
Office: StarOffice. It does all it can to make MSOffice people feel at home, but I'm still having a few problems.
Web: Konqueror/Netscape. Konqueror is nice and fast for nearly everything. I particularly like the way that (from KDE) I can hit the 'windows' button on my keyboard, type in a URL, and I'm away. If there is something that Konqueror can't handle, then I switch to netscape.
So many thanks for all your advice - it was well worth it, and I'm so pleased to have finally ditched Microsoft..
Couple of things I'm still having problems with - if anybody's found a solution I'd be grateful to hear about it:
* I can't print TrueType fonts from StarOffice. They are displayed, but when I print, they get changed to something else. I can't find any info about this at all. My printer is a Tektronix Phaser 560, which handles Postscript level2, and can (apparently) deal with type-42 fonts (whatever that means)... but no luck at all yet...
* Konsole in KDE has this neat 'session' manager that lets you start several shells in one window. However, I have found no way of doing this automatically when I log in. It would be useful if it could launch a konsole window with several shells aready running... Anybody have any ideas?
chris.
ps.. Would anybody be interested in coming to an 'outdoor' meet in the early summer - weather permitting - we have an ideal garden for this, a permanent internet connection, so you could be wired up to the net properly, and we could follow it with a barbecue (and a swim in the pool for those that wanted...)