First things first: I'm just outside Newmarket in a village called Wickhambrook (for the record I'm a very new subscriber to alug)
I have just started a new job where, like Adam (nice web server by the way!), we can pretty much choose between W2k (spit) and something GNU. I installed Mandrake 7.2 ans then a raft of upgrades and it now works beautifully...
I work out my desktop tasks as follows:-
Browsing: Exclusively Mozilla (0.7 at present) except when Konqueror gets used by some legacy K application (like K-mail - anyone know how to stop this?)
I don't find Moz too slow at all but it's lack of a Quicktime plug-in is a pain...
Email:
K-mail is good and getting even better (IMHO). Handles HTML when I want it too, gives me th power to add MIME headers to things when I have to send HTML and has a simple but effective filtering system.
Usenet news: Got a bit clever with this (you can tell I'm still a Linux newbie) and setup Leafnode via crontab to collect my news at certain fixed times when the bandwidth is available and then Knode or Pan to read it.
Office Apps:
Star Office 5.2. Yes it's slow to start up (I'm sure that's 'cause I installed the lot - it's great having 90Gb of storage!!) but does the job. Try to use Gnome or K Office stuff if I can for speed.
The other rather nice thing is that my box gets the usual worm/script virii in my mailbox and laughs at it, unlike some of my colleagues who are still suffering!!
he he
regards all
Nico