Comment by dandotway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dandotway | Hacker News Reader

I saw "Red Hat" on the login screen of a retail cash register a few years ago. If Ubuntu is ready and able to be installed on old workstations with Win 10 that are otherwise about to lose security updates, that could be millions of dollars cheaper than replacing 10,000+ Dells just to get Win 11. And there are still enterprises around that financially reward bean counters that successfully cut costs to increase profitability. So does this create an opening for enterprise Linux?

At the Windows-centric companies I've worked for it was mostly just running Outlook that was the thing we all absolutely had to do every day, with only occasional use of Word.

So many businesses now have replaced Windows native business apps with either web based ones or (less and less) Java apps. Both work on Linux.

Question: How good is Thunderbird nowadays as an alternative to Outlook, from a business decision maker perspective? (Or is there better than Thunderbird for businesses deeply entrenched in Outlook?)

I think this idea is kind of nuts. Even if there is a Linux distro with 1:1 feature parity with Windows for a particular business application--which I don't think is a given--there are still massive hurdles:

- The cost of retraining users

- The cost of evaluating whether, for each use case, the Linux distro has feature parity

- The cost of transitioning each old PC

- The dissatisfaction among the employee base about having to re-learn a system, even if the necessary features are there

- The fact that most business with 10k+ users are going to have business-specific apps that barely run on Windows 10, with no equivalent on Linux

- The risk to the decision-makers if it doesn't pan out -- it's the opposite of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM"

- The fact that all of the back-end infrastructure--active directory domains, security, etc--is going to have to be transitioned too.

- The likely costs to the business itself in terms of lost opportunities, errors, and so on while the transition occurs.

The hardware itself is relatively cheap compared to the cost and logistics of getting that hardware set up and training users. My guess is that basically every business with that quantity of users would choose to just buy new hardware and keep their existing infrastructure and training over the alternative.

One way to look at it though is how easily many consumers are migrating to Chromebooks from Windows PCs (Chromebooks sales have increased over 600% during the pandemic). Since so much can be done in a web browser now, the migration isn't too hard for a considerable number of users. I think the strongest point on your list is the security migration. Hardened Linux has become a preferred OS for militaries and intelligence agencies, but there certainly is a great deal of training and certification involved with setting up SELinux, AppArmor, etc.

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