I had a client ask if she could leave windows altogether. We only use Linux besides a few VMs in our businesses. It got me thinking about how this would work. Other then software specific to a business how would you respond to this? My first thought is this is completely doable because we made it work. My second thought is what would the user experience be? Has anyone successfully made the transition for a business and how did it go?
We have clients that moved to mostly chromebook because all of the software they need all being online. There were only a few exceptions in the finance department that still needed some software loaded. So it really depends on the application needs of the client.
We are a complete Linux shop too. It would all really depend on the applications they need to run their business. As far as office based apps (email, docs, etc) all have great counter parts on Linux. Even further than that places like google o365 and zoho have hosted solutions.
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Just to respond to this. Most of the apps I use are web browser based anyway. If user perfers linux why not? 95% of my new business i’ve been working on is in the web browser. The only two applications I run on a physical PC are photoshop (sometimes) and video editing applications. Otherwise I’m using web based services for everything. I can see the appeal of linux from an IT systems side, frequent updates generally better security why not have it as a base OS? There are many good gui’s now available for the end user.
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I was more questioning the move for the not so technical users of the client(such as the 75-year-old secretary). I personally have no problems. We use Linux for everything and those who don’t need all the functionality get Chromebooks. Has anyone made this transition for an office(such as a bookkeeper) and how did the employees handle it?
If your employees are only comfortable using the windows environment and you would like to space out office-wide security updates and OS upgrades as far as possible, I highly recommend switching them over to Linux Mint. Linux Mint’s design philosophy is to feel like Windows while providing stable updates to their users. Very customizable too. It’s a fork of Ubuntu Linux.
I have no personal experience of moving a whole business but a couple of questions? How did the employees handle the move from Windows 7 to Windows 10? Or handle an upgrade in Microsoft Office? If they handled these then a move to Linux desktop would probably be OK too.
I have moved staff from Outlook to Thunderbird to Zimbra Desktop, or from MS Office to Libre Office and people handled these changes. Not to say it will go without a problem, but no more problems than “upgrades” to MS products.
The only catch may be for someone who uses specialist software for a particular task or compatibility with another service provider, such as the Finance department with their accountant, but here they probably should have moved across to an online solution by now.
The real “risk” you would take is being blamed for someone else’s lack of learning if things don’t go as smoothly as expected by the business. Do you have broad shoulders?
I use Linux for non-business things for the most part at this time. From a business side, how do you manage or control users/systems, or is that not a concern?
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zoho assist is browser based for remote control. Anydesk is another option as it has Linux clients
The elephant in the room is interoperability: it is relatively easy to move a group of users to a different platform, but at least insofar as file sharing and collaboration MS Windows and MS Office are a sticking points as many users share files and assets with other businesses and departments and cross platform sharing can make this challenging. We see this all the time as we field questions about how and why someone’s wonderfully formatted spread sheet or documents don’t display or work well on the other platforms - this can be a deal breaker for many organizations I work with.
I suspect this will change over the next several years as cloud services become ubiquitous and pressure software developers to ensure interoperability ahead of features.
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