Many years ago the college i was doing some work at, a few us in the tech department hatched a scheme to integrate or switch over some of the infrastructure to a linux based system to avoid the annoying documentation requirements that came with software auditing.
A solution that was arrived at was something like crossover linux. I don’t recall what we ended up using actually but it was a windows clone that was similar enough in appearance and function that users didn’t notice enough to complain and it was able to access the windows only network shares just fine.
i would think given what i’ve heard lately of the increasingly ridiculous licensing requirements more businesses would want to move away from windows for non-critical applications.
Best potential replacement/Migration OS’s right now seem to be:
- Cross Over Linux
- Linux Mint
- Zorin OS
- Ubuntu
- Haiku Linux (very visually appealing)