want to pay bills online in Linux

[Adam Myrow]

If you ever figure out a way to do that sort of stuff in Linux, I sure
hope you post it.  The unfortunate truth is that many sites are so
hard-coded to expect Internet Explorer or Netscape, that anything else is
considered inferior.  You can thank Microsoft for including IE with the
OS and thus making sure everybody who sets up web pages tests with IE and
nothing else.  There are four things I'd like to do with Linux that would
make me be able to comfortably use it as my sole OS.  1: print out checks
to my printer and keep track of finances.  2: print envelopes.  3: have a
decent OCR package that is at a reasonable price.  4: have the ability to
create nicely formatted documents and preview them before printing.  Some
of this is certainly possible already.  I could eventually sit down and
learn tex or SGML, but a lot of newbies will be a little stubborn about
learning this.  For me, it's mainly a lack of time.  I have heard of a few
good commercial OCR packages on this list and intend to investigate them.
The only free one I am aware of is gocr, and it is far from usable.  I
wish I knew more about OCR so perhaps I could help make it better.  I know
that there are a few financial packages out there, but I don't know of any
which can print checks.  Sorry about the rambling, but I feel for you and
others who wish we could truly have a choice in OS.  I think things will
get better when an X screen reader gets to a point of being functional,
but it looks like that is easier said than done.  It's a shame too.  Linux
is stable, fairly secure, and even if an application bombs, it doesn't
take down the whole OS.  I can count on my fingers the number of times
I've had to reboot a Linux box due to a crash, and all the times it
happened were when I was testing something which was known to be
problematic.