Ask HN: What blocks you from switching your small-to-medium business to Linux?

I am a very small business, just me. I am thinking of jumping to Linux because of the direction that Windows is going. Soon your computer will be like your cell phone, completely locked down and owned by MS.

For me the killer is Outlook which has all my client info and the ability to print on my Dymo printer. I can live with Libre Office for docs and I can probably find other work arounds but the transition doesn't look easy.

I switched full time more than decade ago, I was part-time before the switch. I often hear colleagues ranting that they don't want to spend time on setting things up (like audio, or dual screen, or figuring out how to connect their laptop to beam projector). I admit I am sometimes forced to spend some time fixing stuff that does not work to my liking, other times I have to fix something I have broken myself. Never more than an hour, and most of the times I manage to learn something new about my system. I would not trade my Arch for anything else in the world.

CAD software.

We are a 40 to 50-ish company and have been running Linux on our desktops since 2005. Back then our stack consisted of Gnome with roaming homedirs on AFS, LDAP and Kerberos. As office suite we used OpenOffice / LibreOffice. For groupware we used Open-Xchange since 2005 all the way to something like 2018 I think. For ERP/CRM we used (and still use) iDempiere (started out as Compiere waaaay back, then migrated to the Adempiere fork, then the iDempiere fork).

The desktop was always a RedHat based derivative. Preloading desktops with Anaconda kickstart via PXE. I believe we started with Fedora and switched to CentOS for the predictability. And recently switched to Rocky Linux because of the new positioning of CentOS.

However nowadays we mostly use our Linux desktop with Google Workspace (Spreadsheets, Drive, etc.) and no longer self host OX, AFS, etc.

Being in the legal field, I need to transfer documents and be sure they are formatted correctly. LibreOffice is maybe 90% as easy as Word at creating documents, but editing and saving Word files it frequently messes up something. Sometimes it's minor and sometimes it's not, but I'm not going to spend 11⅑% more effort making documents in addition to taking that chance just to avoid Microsoft.

In addition, there's nothing close to Outlook. Thunderbird works okay, but it's definitely not an acceptable replacement. I'd sooner use Outlook's webmail.

Small business owner. Consultant. I've been a Windows user and developer for 2 decades. I get immense value from my work station with Windows 10 on it (will update to Windows 11 soon) and I get immense value from my Office 365 Business subscription as well as my home one. Windows has a broad range of corporate tools that I haven't even gotten to the level where I have use of them, so for the time being, I don't see any disadvantage.

I can just work with client files as they all use Windows, I can use all my favorite development tools, I can play my favorite games. Contrary to what a lot of people seem to have experienced, all my Windows devices have been plug and play for the longest time. I can make pretty presentations in Powerpoint and just send them to customers. I can collaborate on Word documents with other people, get spell checked, have actually humane formatting (I'm looking at you OpenOffice, Libre)... anyway, I'm just listing benefits, I could go on for a long time.

What advantages would switching to Linux bring me at this point? I run all my servers on Linux and wouldn't switch that to Windows for ideological reasons.

Because Linux isn't a _product_, it's a piece of infrastructure. Whereas the suite of technologies you list are products, where a company gets rewarded financially for them working well.

Frankly, people aren't usually interested in the last 10% to 'make it work' if it isn't a labor of love for them OR they're getting paid to make the last 10% work. When its no longer fun, they want to move onto the next thing. A LOT of a successful software product simply isn't fun, its just work that needs to get done.

Not the owner, but the one of the principal decision makers for this sort of thing. We're an org that just hit 100 employees and prior to migrating our ancient software stack to heavily utilize 365 offerings we looked into Linux, especially for cost savings. The reason we didn't go with it, and the reason we lean so hard into 365 now, is the traditional Office product. Word formatting, Excel macros, conditional document access, basically everything about the Exchange/Outlook ecosystem, all of it is absolutely necessary for our B2B work. The only thing that comes even close to meeting our requirements is corporate GSuite accounts and using Linux as a fancy, and difficult to secure, thin client for those offerings. So we decided why choose the lesser evil and now pay Microsoft thousands a month to not think very hard.

When i ran my little side hustle, almost all of my customers cared about only 2 things (related to your question):

1) They wanted training on any software. These were not "techies". These people who ran or worked in small businesses, and did not care if their machine was Windows, or their apps were Microsoft or whatever...as long as they were trained, and ideally some training/hep docs were available to them, they were happy.

2) As long as files that they needed to send/receive with/from their customers and other partner firms was ok, and not botched/messed up...then they were happy. For some of my customers, this became the biggest sticking point, and some times not in their control. For some customers, i could pivot them into different directions, for example, create web portals so their customers didn;'t need Word docs sent to them in the first place, or maybe send a PDF (exported from LibreOffice), etc. Some customers were open to different directions, others felt uncomfortable.

I will add that if i were a better sales person (I'm a way better wingman to sales, but not great at closing slaes on my own)...for item #2 above, there were plenty of opportunities to create apps/services that could be sold to customers to semi-automate the creatuion of more "conventional" office file formats. I had little success, not because of tech constraints, but moreso because i could not close deals. The challenge is changing the minds of customers towards solutions that could be cheaper, better in the long term...Microsoft's hold on business mindshare is not easy to undo.

I tried to work out with Linux. Got it running for cca 1 year, where every day I was forced to solve random weird issues. One day Linux wanted to install graphic drivers (Got NVidia card), tried to install by some random manual, ended up with black screen after restart, rage quitted, formatted, installed Windows.

Since then I am using Linux only when there is no other option possible - either in VM or on RPi.

Nothing.

I started my business (handyman/contracting) five years ago. It's been on Linux from day one. Why would I bother with anything else when Linux fills all my needs?

Mine is a side hustle / microbusiness, but 1) I use Mac 2) I don't want to use Linux, that's basically the whole story.

Adobe software

Nothing, I did. Everything runs Linux.

None of my main tools run (at all/adequately/stably) on it even with compatibility stuff like Wine.

Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher

Ableton Live

Various Native Instruments gadgets

Serum

Scrivener

Linux is fine. It just doesn't have the software I need. No, none of the things you want to mention will do. Yes, I used them extensively before I had what I have now. I feel the need to say this because people will often stroll in with the assumption that I just don't know what's available or tried it too long ago for the experience to be credible.

I've been a Windows user since Win95, used it professionally since Win98 SE. I'm just so used to it that it became second nature to me. I've dabbled in some Linux blends but for one reason or another I always:

- Hated the looks of it - Something got borked - Had issued with drivers - None of my apps run well on it.

I need Windows because it does what I need it to do: Operate my system. I don't use Office nor Outlook because I never send emails or write documents and if I HAVE to write a document I'll jot it in Notion or just in EditPadLite. I just need Windows because it runs all my apps properly, all the time. I'm sure a Mac can as well, but I'm not going to spend 2500 on a laptop that overheats and has a terrible keyboard. Linux, any blend, is just out of the question for me. And seeing what Microsoft has been doing to make Windows more developer friendly, now all tools that used to require a Linux command line, now work fine in Windows CMD. I'm talking about node, npm, chocolatey, python, php. It's all just installed and working fine. And therefore I don't want to switch. At all.

My 20-person biotech startup runs on Linux including the workstations of a vast majority of employees.

There are definitely pain points, but also substantial productivity gains. For anybody trying this, my advice would be to attempt to ship the lowest number of possible HW configurations internally - with the ideal being having everybody on a same model of a laptop.

The OS is a small part of the business cost, and switching all productivity products is going to take retraining, lost productivity, and likely compatibility issues. Why would anyone do this to themselves?

Every engineering team I have worked on in the last 10 years has been almost exclusively Linux. But I've never seen other job types using it. That's fine by me though.

As a small biz you often hire contractors and its important that they focus on delivering value, not adhere to pre-established tool mandates.

As for perm staff, computers are cheap since they can last for years. Windows, and Macs aren't that expensive in the grand scheme of things.

I do have a handful of Raapberry Pis in a food wearhouse but I'm not doing to demand any analyst to stop using Tableau on their mac when they digging through my order book looking for oppurtunities.

All this talk about "I need Office to be Office" and no one mentions o365 online? Which works just fine on Linux. Also label printing seems a common issue but no mention of support of old old old legacy hardware that still works perfectly fine. For instance, my scanner which still works perfectly fine but won't work on Windows or Mac anymore works just fine on Linux because of the legacy driver support.

Not a business owner. Programmer who was a sysadmin in a former life and is familiar with all three O/S and a few others, e.g. embedded firware, etc.

In every organization, there is usually one app that ties a particular user to a non Linux OS, e.g. usually it's Adobe products, sometimes active directory, sometimes it's because "we have Access and it does everything we need it to and no we don't know what it does anymore", we need X software for X platform because skillsets and training.

A lot of lawyers would still (and some still are) be on WordPerfect if they could be, some accountants are probably still on FoxPro somewhere out there, but IME most users just need a Chromebook and a subscription to o365. Maybe ChromeOS Flex is an option for them?

If they have custom needs then they IME don't need much more than a CSV file and a simple ruby script that can import their label addresses from a CSV and spit them out to the printer a la ruby's Prawn.

The argument for training loses weight when each version of Windows and macOS changes fairly drastically you have to relearn with each major upgrade. Usually forcing hardware upgrades too well before the machine has stopped being viable. Whereas learning Linux once and that being all you have to know forever and can blast onto any machine, copy your files over, run your setup flat files or whatever you use to bootstrap your setup and IMO the training argument should push more to Linux but it never will for one simple reason. Support. If the manager can't offload a user needing help to support then all bets are off.

I have two identical Dell boxes, one running Windows 10, the other Fedora. I have been using Windows since version 1 (a real dog) and Fedora since version 10. The Win system is my main workhorse because: 1. I need to exchange highly complex Word documents with my clients and LibreOffice is just not 100% compatible (although improving slowly). 2. The onset of RSI means that I'm heavily dependent on Nuance Dragon for dictating and it's not available for Linux (and Wine seems unable to run it). 3. Plug and play - my Brother colour laser printer worked perfectly with Windows from the moment I plugged it in. Linux recognised it as just a plain text printer; after some searching, I found I had to open a terminal and type in three lines of gobbledegook - and even then it didn't work. NOT good enough! I quite like Linux despite the amateurish appearance of its GUI (and whoever thought that shrinking the vertical scroll bars to the minimum was a good idea?) but at the end of the day my priority has to be getting my work done and so far Windows is ahead of the pack. Oh, and another thing: I don't think Linux will ever gain an important place on the desktop while there are so many distros around. Three at the most with absolutely no compatibility issues between them is what's needed. One would be even better - it doesn't really matter which one.

With Outlook being mentioned as the "killer application" for staying with Windows, I'm curious to learn if anyone has evaluated Evolution (Linux groupware) and found it lacking in key areas? If so, which?

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