For business users I'd say the biggest thing is Active Directory - being able to manage and micro-manage a fleet of hundreds or thousands of PCs by a small team is highly desirable.
People have said this before, but how much frustration does it cause when microsoft moves a default ribbon around? Try moving those people to a program with different icons. Yikes. Now do it across a giant organization and try to justify the resulting performance hit to a board.
This isn't even getting into all of the arcane business logic that keeps processes moving built on excel sheets, fucking macros and who knows what else. Sure, most of it works fine but when it doesn't and people don't know how, why or where...
I also had bad luck with drivers and bluetooth/audio issues the last time I tried to switch. That might have been just that particular Ubuntu release though.
I might try it sometime soon again, especially if Microsoft annoys me with Windows 11 again.
All I'd say is it's pretty easy and more or less "just works" these days. I remember fighting over basic stuff like second monitors, but for the most part, all the issues relating to Linux itself are solved. A DE like Gnome is simple, clean and easy to use. Gaming totally works thanks to Steam.
The only hurdle is if you absolutely need a full Office or Adobe install. For most of us, that comes with our work machines. For me, Linux is perfect for my personal rig.
Wouldn't dream of going back.
The biggest things are that you probably want a newer kernel, and your motherboard needs proper IOMMU layout to isolate the GPU. This is "the" tutorial if you're interested:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Wi...
Also QuickBooks (online does not come close to replacing desktop enterprise) & CAD, in my experience.
The application is cumbersome enough as a native app I can't even imagine if the whole thing were ported to run on JS.
Until the answer to "Will this new game run on Linux?" becomes "Of course it does. Why wouldn't it?", it's not good enough.
That said, I've heavily considered running a Linux VM in my Windows box and doing nearly all my day-to-day activities inside the VM and only switching out to Windows to play games. I've got 128 GB of RAM, so I could dedicate a healthy 32 GB to the Linux VM and still have far more than I need for gaming in the Windows host.
Dual booting is a pain in the ass. I won't do it.
as someone else mentioned, anti-cheat is a big problem, and on a linux system that runs into both the practical challenges as well as the "it's a FOSS box and no one makes me install a kernel module unless I approve" angle.
The main thing is - if you are in the microsoft ecosystem enough to be seriously using AD - you use AD. Microsoft IT is its own world.
You can replicate a lot of it in *nix but I've never seen anything as cohesive as a windows domain controller.
I think the only windows services I 100% would give a thumbs down to is websites (I do not like IIS) and print management.
Legacy software for me.
Catia only works on Windows.
For example, QuickBooks may run just fine with Wine (not sure, haven't checked), but it would forfeit your ability to access QuickBooks Support personnel. For businesses without a dedicated IT department (or just a small one), this may be a deal breaker.
The other wrench is that we arent just using Catia, we are using Visual Studio and communicating via COM to make macros, Visual Studio is nice because it has an integrated COM debugger.
I got another... I need to run a Catia license server too.
Just to clarify, Fedora is the greatest OS of all time. I would love to use it 100% of the time. Windows is utter trash in comparison.
I'll second AD -- ain't no way we're moving away from that or Azure AD (EntraID). I've done OpenIPA deployments before and AD is a fairly mature product all things considered. Like, if you think AD is shit, wait until you start messing with OpenLDAP implementations...