urlwolf, I may well do that, documenting the transition from Windows to Linux, although that might bore most people to death. Many have done it before elsewhere and I see Windows-to-Mac users doing it daily to my dismay. I don't hate Microsoft, but imo they no longer care about me, the customer, and frankly, among other reasons, I can no longer afford their products. Moreover, at this point in my computing life, I have over 22 years of data, documents, letters, books, theses, a dissertation, and so on that I want to protect. Microsoft is not interested in doing that unless I pay them to access my data saved with their various proprietary file formats through their software, i.e., vendor lock-in.
Half of my life is invested in my work and writing, and I'll be damned if I'll ever let it be held hostage to a corporation. Not coincidently, Microsoft feels the same way with their own data — they're quick to sue, the threaten patent lawsuits, and they're currently fighting the national bodies of countries around the world to make their product specification of MS-OOXML an ISO standard.
So I've devolved to the simpler formats over the past six years to the point where I even keep backups of most everything in a simple text file (sans formatting, of course). I'll keep a Microsoft machine on the desk for several more years probably, although I won't upgrade anymore after Vista. So using my "text" outlines and files in Linux is the simplest transition on any platform. And the safest. No, I don't get the wonderful benefits of OneNote. But then, I'm not encumbered or beholden to buying, keeping, upgrading, and converting files to the new versions either.
PS: I'm not trying to start a war here against Microsoft; I'm just laying out how I feel these days, and where my head is.
