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.
>>> 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.
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've previously been a regular user and gave up because of poor multi monitor support. Seems things actually went backward while I was away.
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.
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.
Most computers were running Linux at Lowe's when I left a few years ago.
RHEL and SLES enters the chat.
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.
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.
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.