Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop | Hacker News Reader

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

theregister.com

58 pointslawgimenez52 comments

It's easier and quicker to deploy, no licensing or registration, full customization capabilities, runs on lighter and cheaper hardware, excellent Windows app support via Wine... it baffles me that it hasn't become a standard business OS yet. I've never seen Linux on any company's computer that wasn't a server.

Because supporting it in reality is a nightmare?

On my experience, repairing Windows environments is so hard people just nuke everything and rebuild from a known good image. Why would Linux support be any different?

There are a lot of young entry-level help desk technicians that know how to do basic Windows troubleshooting. If you need an engineer to get involved in a tier 1 support issue, that's really a waste of everyone's time.

>There are a lot of young entry-level help desk technicians that know how to do basic Windows troubleshooting.

I'd guess that's largely due to the fact that a large amount of Windows troubleshooting boils down to one of 3 things: Reseting the software to default, reinstalling the software completely, or reinstalling Windows.

To me the fact that you have a whole it outsourcing industry to do "basic Windows troubleshooting" is a giant Red herring that those systems are a pain to maintain.

Not that Linux isn't also a pain to maintain when things go wrong, but at least on Linux, when something breaks it's because I broke it.

Yeah, agreed. Plus you can keep home folders as separate partitions, even synced to the network daily, so nuking a machine and restoring from a backup can be done remotely with just a few cli commands

The same goes for Windows.

Yes, but in Linux you don't have a registry to deal with, so nuking the machine and restoring it can be a lot simpler

Folder redirection, roaming profiles and group policy makes this quick and easy on Windows too. This has been a solved issue on Windows for quite a long time.

I didn't say it was unsolved, I said it's easier to deal with in Linux

Let me clarify. It is long solved on Windows and easy to implement at this point. I don't agree that it is easier to deal with in Linux.

It’s also easier to hire for. Everyone seems to forget this lol.

If I’m hiring a team of accountants at 100k a year and they all have experience with Windows and Excel, the collective licensing cost is worth it to not have to retrain, troubleshoot, etc.

Plus external vendors / B2B customers lock in the Windows ecosystem as well. It’s getting less common, but there are still plenty of businesses that send excel / word docs to each other via email. If your business sends a “word compatible” RFQ that has weird characters that couldn’t be decoded or logos that don’t render, that’s not a great look. The cost of bad impressions is greater than the cost of software licensing from Microsoft.

I can't imagine trying to keep junky accounting and business software that is prone to breaking running on wine. Wine is great, but I dont want to add extra things to troubleshoot.

There are cloud-based SaaS alternatives to most of that stuff now. I much prefer a locally installed application myself, but the world is definitely headed toward a perpetual rental/subscription model. If I'm going to be paying rent for my software anyway, the convenience of SaaS is hard to pass up.

Re: wine though, I agree that would be nightmare, but nice thing about deploying as a business is once you get a working image together you can deploy it out to everyone, and only bring in patches that are tested/working. After the initial effort I don't think it would be much more labor intensive than managing windows updates.

Wine is probably a more stable target than Windows.

> no licensing or registration

RHEL and SLES enters the chat.

> I've never seen Linux on any company's computer that wasn't a server.

Most computers were running Linux at Lowe's when I left a few years ago.

Interesting. I'll have to ask an employee next time I have to drop in for something. It'll be very random, but oh well.

I believe it was RHEL. IceWM was in use.

Are you talking about all computers or just the checkout systems? Did the accounting department or whoever use Linux?

Most of the computers throughout the store, to include checkout. I think the kitchen section had one running Windows. Training room computers ran Linux. There were 3 or 4 offices and I'm not sure what OS was on those computers. There was no accounting department at the store.

Yeah and some distros even come with Libre Office bundled in. In all my time using it, I’ve never run into problems apart from some tiny edge cases like not being able to use Windows-specific fonts like Impact etc But you can install Windows fonts in Linux for that situation.

Then there’s ChromeOS Flex where you can open any Office document and edit and store in the cloud with Google Docs. There’s really no excuse for using Windows for office stuff anymore.

Does Zoom desktop work on Wine? Slack?

Both of those already have Linux versions.

This. No need for Wine to run those, they're native

Are you being clueless on purpose? You want to tell random regular office workers to mess with wine on Linux? Does it really baffle you?

I use linux desktop and it is ridiculosuly janky and messy. I mean I assume you have no idea what sort of requirements IT shops and users at regular businesses have.

I mean really? At least say MacOS or something but even with the excellent UI and managability and apple support it still would be a terrible fit as a default unless you are a startup with techies or s tech first business like uber, graphic designers, digital publishers and such.

Let me tell you how absurd this shit is and how clueless you are all being here: even if you had a magic wand that mad linux nice and usable like macos and you managed to get every random business app to work reliably and in a managable way you still have people that want to run random windows programs because of preference or because a client requires it,etc... and the moment that internally developed app by a client doesn't work in wine what then? Is wine offering paid support and SLAs? Matter of fact are all the alternative apps that magically work also come with reliable support or are off to github issues begging and pleading devs? Been there, done that lol.

Forget standard OS, outside of tech companies you can't even support Linux desktop for internal devs and IT people that promise they can manage it on their own.

Let me say one final thing here: people like you are hurting Linux Desktop more than anyone else. You pretend it is great instead of calling it what it is so it can improve. All is well and only idiots don't like it puh! And each time someone thinks you know what you are talking about it becomes that much less likely to be supported for general use because general users are now alienated.

It works, I like it and use it daily when it does. But relatively speaking it is bottom tier shit for general business use.

I will agree that using wine is not something we would consider using, but

>>> It works, I like it and use it daily when it does. But relatively speaking it is bottom tier shit for general business use.

that's definitely a problem on your end.

we've been running linux on laptops and desktops using puppet for configuration and native packaging to distribute our own modifications for almost a decade now and I wouldn't change it for anything.

our software requirements are simple, but you did say "general business".

some of our employees don't know the word linux, but they have been using it for years.

The thing you should appreciate is how wildly diverse "general business" is.

Will you seriously tell me that office workers can be as productive and happy using a Linux desktop as with MacOs (to not get into unix vs windows bs)?

Just the UI consistency alone is a killer on mac.

You mentioned puppet and all that but that requires being able to hire people to manage that. Objectively speaking the personell cost alone is significant. 4-5 years ago Linux server admins cost 20% or more more. With desktop I would imagine a lot higher? Not to mention you would need to reimplement ad dependent stuff like dns, and pki in most orgs. And any new IT vendor/product you try to evaluate to help with some business need will also need to be compatible with a Linux enviroment which is pretty specific to you (unlike AD/Windows or Jamf/Mac).

I wanted to go back to Linux desktop at home earlier this year. I installed a mainstream distro with default options. The first time screensaver activated I was unable to unlock without jumping to a vt and doing stuff on the command line. I don't have time for that so gave up.

I've previously been a regular user and gave up because of poor multi monitor support. Seems things actually went backward while I was away.

For me what irks me is that I customize the hell out it and things break. Right no I have a simple openbox install but disabled avahi and a bunch of things I don't need. Took a day to get it working but still, after login it hangs for 5min+ before the desktop+taskbar shows up. Haven't even found an error logged somewhere. It also waits for 2 min on a shutdown job when turning it off. I just accept stuff like this and tolerate it.

People have been making this argument for as long as I've been alive, and for the majority of non technical businesses, it's less true than ever... Malware is less prevalent, and MS Office remains pretty supreme.

Malware has been swapped with "legitimized" spyware (telemetry, etc.), which in some contexts with sensitive data involved is simply not acceptable, and although it is without doubt true that MS Office is more powerful than LibreOffice, it is also true that the vast majority of MS Office users would never need the features that LibreOffice lacks.

> vast majority of MS Office users would never need the features that LibreOffice lacks

Except for Excel. Excel is truly amazing software and there isn't anything to replace it for many people. I use Python now for my number-crunching, but I used to use Excel extensively when I worked in quality assurance and didn't have access to Python. No way that LibreOffice's spreadsheet can replace it, except for the most simple of spreadsheets. At least not today.

I've used LibreOffice Calc for plenty number crunching, with a lot of conditional formatting, dropdown data entry, complex cross-sheet formulae, etc. and I've never run into any issues with unsupported formulae or anything like that. Usually any issues I have are just menu features being in different places, or their usage not being entirely clear, but that's easily resolved with a quick Google search.

When was the last time this guy used a Windows machine?

Microsoft is pretty quick when it comes to providing security updates these days.

Windows has a vastly greater amount of business software available for it than Linux. As to using this software via Wine on Linux: sometimes it works, often times it doesn't.

I think there are two things that are needed for Linux desktop in the business world to take off.

First, there are a few pieces of software that users are used to using. Outlook and Office are the biggest. Yes you can use alternatives or the web version, but most people are not used to them or they could be missing certain features. Until LibreOffice / online versions have full feature parity it will be a deal breaker. With more and more software becoming online only, this may be less and less of an issue going forward.

The other missing thing is first class support for AD. I think most Linux distros have decent support for on prem AD, but most (none?) have support for the cloud AD version. The cloud version is becoming more and more popular so until it can be supported I don't think businesses will accept it.

I agree with the AD part. A lot of the comments in this thread seem to focus on applications. Sure, that's a little bit of an issue. MS Office is a good example of that. But applications aren't the main roadblock at this point - most things are web based these days anyway. And I'm sure with enough work you could setup a perfectly acceptable user environment, too. What I'm surprised not to see mentioned are the management capabilities - things like group policy, SCCM, WSUS and the like. I just can't imagine trying to maintain a fleet of hundreds or thousands of linux desktop computers. I imagine it would be like herding cats.

This could definitely be a thing if someone was willing to pay and a team could be built to fix/prevent regressions.

For example have been using Ubuntu Mate for almost ten years. A potentially great traditional corporate desktop. In that time it seems to have lost functionality in every release due to CADT. Most issues come from upstream, there are not enough knowledgeable folks to fix breakage.

I would like to help, but the last book was published in 2004 or so, and don’t have time to piece together docs from 50 places. Another sign of lack of investment.

In short I think there’s a business opportunity here, if anyone has a contact willing to help bootstrap it.

According to Theo De Raadt, Windows actually handles viruses better than Linux. Of course that’s his arch rival, so who really knows.

Either way, the age old argument of Windows is unsafe because the software pool is larger doesn’t really hold up if the goal is to increase Linux’s software pool. That is again, assuming Linux is no better with viruses.

This article reads like something I wrote in high school after discovering Ubuntu. Adopting Linux isn’t worth the difficult transition for businesses and ultimately wouldn’t be much benefit. And for the record, I believe OS’s, and any other sort of fundamental software should be free. People would go mad if they had to run everything in Wine. Idk how well LibreExcel or whatever handles spreadsheets with 10,000 rows from db tables. Even though I prefer working in browser, I quickly found in that use case I NEEDED desktop Excel because Google Sheets would lag heavily.

Because of business, I cannot switch to linux. For personal use, sure, no problem. But if you use Adobe for business, linux is out unfortunately.

I remember installing Linux back in 1999 and after I thought I was finished something wasn't working -- it turned out that I still needed to compile and install a floppy-disk driver.

This is interesting. I recall that all the distros I used were shipping generic floppy drivers as part of the default install at that time.

Another example of IT making its job easier at the expense of making everyone else's job 100x more difficult.

Linux is not easier to use than Windows. Especially not once hardware is involved.

Anecdotal, but my computer "just worked" with Linux (arch). Though I do have prior experience with it.

In general, avoid nvidia and a few ancient wifi cards. Oh, and you will never go wrong with Intel wifi.

In general, avoid nvidia and

Clearly, Linux doesn't "just work" if you need to avoid the gpus from the biggest maker of GPUs.

No, it's nvidia doesn't "just work", intentionally.

They still work but they are a source of potential problems. And it's entirely Nvidia's fault for their practices. Avoiding Nvidia is just avoiding associated problems.

People talk about how "Mac OS just works" and you literally haven't been able to use an Nvidia GPU with their OS for years even on desktop rigs like the Mac Pro.

Most business systems are using Intel GPUs unless there's a specific need for workstations with Nvidia or AMD discrete graphics.

Anecdotally, my main PC runs Linux Mint 21, has an Nvidia GTX 1080, and installing the proprietary driver for it took me all of 5 minutes in the GUI Driver Manager tool. The FOSS nouveau driver was pre-installed initially but the GUI tool handled disabling it and enabling the closed source driver, then prompted me to reboot.

Never had a problem with it since then, but I'm also not trying to live on the cutting edge with Wayland.

They prescribe the hardware, so that's not an issue:

> So, instead, GitLab demands that its employees use either macOS or a Dell Linux laptop.

Hardware compatibility is easy to solve this way for companies.

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