I am a IT solutions provider for the public and small business. I think the changes to Windows 11 is gearing up to work with organizations to create a surveillance state.
So I have to decided to promote Linux over Windows for computers I build for customers. If you have any suggestions on how I can make this promotion, better let me know.
Make sure libreoffice is included, and ublock origin. Show them how much faster it is, with fewer ads, and no subscription to Microsoft required just to write a document.
The business customers might want to know that databases are a lot cheaper on Linux, especially for small business.
Literally spoke to an automation company the other week that told me "we have to delete a bunch of stuff every time the database gets near 10GB or we'll have to pay Microsoft".
Plus there's no license cost for linux itself either.
This stuff might not be viable for hundreds of employees in a business where MS is already entrenched, but for a small business it absolutely is a better deal.
Probably an unpopular thing to say here, but in my experience pushing non-tech people to use libreoffice as part of a Linux transition is a fast track to getting them to hate Linux.
Using Google Docs has been much more welcoming in my experience. Something about libreoffice doesn’t resonate with a lot of non-tech people.
Couldn’t agree more, if you’re pitching Linux to a non-technical user, you need a gentler off-ramp, not a cliff dive. LibreOffice is a UI time capsule..more archaeology than productivity. Most millennials would think they’d accidentally opened a flight simulator.
I was confused about this because last time I used LibreOffice it wasn't that bad. Turns out, it's really just a normal UI? I guess the biggest difference is it doesn't conform to Microsoft's design but to call it a time capsule is a bit dramatic.
I think by default after fresh install it suggests the "old" layout akin to Office 2000, but you can just select "tabbed ribbon" and then it really isn't half bad.
You know we are living in crazy times when people actually actively ask for the ribbon interface instead of making fun of Microsoft for it. It's one of the worst things ever conceived in UI design.
Both have their issues but having 50 uncategorized icons (I just looked up default libre office ui screenshot and counted...) is something only a power user can love. They can keep their classic ui as an option.
Categorized ribbon is an improvement for most people. Especially new generations who simply can't enjoy the effect of shared conventions with other software.
I’m relieved to see I’m not alone. I expected my comment to be downvoted because speaking against LibreOffice triggers some people
> LibreOffice is a UI time capsule..more archaeology than productivity.
I agree. Seeing the comments here claiming the outdated UI is a good thing, actually, brings up one of the big problems with a lot of open source and/or Linux soecific software: The resistance to UI change is huge among die-hard users so the projects tend to get stuck in whatever UI language they had a decade ago when they started
When I introduce people to open source versions of different software I find myself starting with “The UI has a steep learning curve, but…”.
It would be so much easier if we could give people apps that were targeted at familiar UI patterns of today, even if it angers a vocal minority who want every UI to look like it came out of the 90s or early 2000s when they first discovered their love of computers.
>The resistance to UI change is huge among die-hard users so the projects tend to get stuck in whatever UI language they had a decade ago when they started
Oh, worse: stuck in whatever weird, half-baked UI decisions that were made because someone had a great idea that they did not test at all, or because they hated the industry standard approach that everyone else uses. It's no secret that Blender adoption exploded when they added normal menus, and then made right-click select an optional function, and then finally added an auto Maya-like interface option.
But that's one instance where we lucked out. Not just because they fixed it, but also because the thing that needed to be fixed was in users' face and obvious.
I don't think it's that people want a certain nostalgic UI. It's that most of these applications are built by volunteers, for free, and are already understaffed. From an individual's perspective, it's much more important, and possible, to fix bug #155 or implement a new feature than to try to overhaul the entire UI. In order to do that, you'd have to get everyone on board and everyone would have to agree with the changes. A lot of projects are too flat as organizations for this to go smoothly.
I'll grant that it's personal preference and OP should do what his customers prefer, but what you said is a good thing. UIs have sucked for some time now, so something which deliberately uses an older style is generally far superior.
OnlyOffice might be a better option here - its UI is similar to MS Office, and it has a much better MS Office file format compatibility compared to LibreOffice.
I've never heard of OnlyOffice, but that really looks quite promising. I'll have a deeper look at it later, but even though it's all webapp based it can't really be slower than libreoffice...
I usually take moments like this to relate my experience of OpenOffice (LibreOffice, prefork) blanking several of my documents, courtesy a bug that may or may not still be in LibreOffice. But this leads me to the reason I'm bringing it up now: the incre~dibly uncomfortable and unwelcoming experience of trying to pry 1) What happened, and 2) How to fix it out of the OO/LO volunteer support community.
My understanding is that the issue is the way OO/LO and the OS work together to handle file writes, which will not be changed because Linux distros do it right and Windows does it wrong and too bad that I was trying to use OO on a Windows PC. But I can't get a straight answer, and even if I were to, it wouldn't fix the bug - because the bug would be that I was using Windows. And now that I know that this is something that happens, I don't have any real guarantee that tomorrow the problem won't be the particular distro that I use, or whatever weird personal ax-to-grind led to the design decision that would now be giving me a headache. And that probably goes doubly for your average Windows user who doesn't really know what they're getting into.
Obviously, Google's support situation isn't any better. They've also had their share of catastrophic data loss fun-times. I genuinely don't know what the answer is.
I agree with this despite being a libre office user. The introduction should be gentle, not dogmatic. No harm in using a browser based web application for this use case.
I can't imagine trying to replace MS word with libreoffice for businesses. I respect the project and the complexity of the task, but it's just not there for even light professional use.
As an example, I recently submitted a manuscript following standard format [0] with libreoffice. Nothing difficult, just basic professional functionality.
The only way to do it involved editing global default page styles (because custom page styles can't be used for title pages?) and other advanced features. Fair enough, at least it was possible. It's a shame the export process didn't preserve the formatting and screwed up page numbering.
I had to fix the manuscript in gdocs instead, where it was easy.
FWIW I'm not trying to interrogate you, I'm just trying to understand your perspective. From mine I just checked their checklist [1] and it's unclear to me what on that list you're suggesting required advanced features in Libre Office to achieve.
Headers were the big one. The shunn format has no header on the first page, and numbered headers on subsequent pages.
Libreoffice only allows either headers on all pages of a specific style, or no headers. So, how to apply a different style to just the first page? It supports that with the title page concept. But that menu only allows you to select either the Default and First Page styles, not custom styles you've added, so you have to modify the global defaults.
Then there's the numbering. LO requires headers to be the same across all pages, up to left/right distinction. That means you can't manually number. If you want to use the shunn "name/title/number" format you have to write "name/title/" and then enable the checkbox, accepting the slightly uneven spacing.
This is probably half a dozen menus altogether, which I consider advanced. It also confused the page numbering and tried to label the title page as the last page.
Another issue is that shunn's requires multiple alignments within a single line. This isn't directly supported in a reasonable way, but the same workarounds are required in MS word and gdocs so it's not like LO is especially deficient.
Smart quotes also don't work on copy-pasted text, only by a primitive typo correction system when typing. That's more of a personal process issue, since I was copying out of the markdown I do my actual editing in.
>
I can't imagine trying to replace MS word with libreoffice for businesses. I respect the project and the complexity of the task, but it's just not there for even light professional use.
Exactly.
Just work in the finance or insurance industry for a year, and you will see how it is part of the daily workflow to use very obscure, advanced Excel feature combined with VBA. If a proposed Microsoft Office alternative cannot handle this, it's not suitable.
I personally observe that a lot of nerds who barely use Excel in their daily workflow patronising that ... (in particular LibreOffice) is an alternative to Microsoft Office. Better first learn how the actual powerusers' workflows (in particular for Excel in the finance and insurance industry) actually look like.
> I personally observe that a lot of nerds who barely use Excel
Most people using Excel/Sheets/Word/Docs are not power users. Pretty much all home use is covered by OpenOffice and that is the majority by user count.
Totally agree. I would never use windows at home but Excel at work is the main reason to ever use Windows.
I have Libre Calc installed because I am on mint at home and even if it could do everything excel could do, I don't know how to do things the same way. Neither do most people. The personal experience and network effect is insurmountable for other software.
There's an import function in the File dropdown, with a dialog giving you control over separators. If that fails, you can paste the data, followed by Data > Split text to Columns. I work with CSVs in Google Sheets often and it's pretty reliable.
You can either complain about how Microsoft is treating or you can keep making excuses and add on requirements until there is no alternative but if you keep doing both you deserve whatever you get.
I switched from Google Docs to Libre Office a few months ago. I'm surprised how buggy LO is, because I tried it a decade ago and it doesn't seem to have gotten any better. I don't plan on going back to MS or Google, but I am very frustrated with the number of bugs in LO's spreadsheets, so I try to keep my sheets simple and CTRL-S a LOT!
Examples: [1] I selected a range of cells recently, by clicking and dragging, and when I let go of the mouse button, all of the selected cells shifted up and to the right by one cell, and CTRL-Z didn't undo it! [2] I have a workbook and when i duplicate a sheet with a chart, the chart is blank, so i have to delete it and re-insert a new one. [3] Sometimes the left-hand X-axis is cut in half, and I have no idea why, but if I create a new doc it goes away. I really, really want to promote LO, but it is very buggy. I can deal with it but I don't think others would.
Please report the issues as Libreoffice developers would like to know how to improve it. Might I also suggest trying ONLYOFFICE, it really looks and feels like MS Office. I am not a heavy Office user so I never run into issues but this one 'looks' professional.
I use LO for its word processor fairly extensively and have been pretty happy with it, but for spreadsheets I am 100% on team gnumeric---it is rock solid, less buggy than Excel itself, and supports a lot of Excel formulas and formatting better than MS's own web client.
thanks for the suggestion i just installed it (macos). it solved problem #2, I'll have to wait and see what happens with #1 and #3. I like it but it's like going to a new grocery store and everything is in a different place than i am used to thanks!
Glad you liked it! For charts in particular, I find gnumeric to be more solid than any other spreadsheet software I've tried (including Excel)—the charts are more stable and more configurable, and there are options for more of them (e.g. histograms, which are something I frequently want and Excel just doesn't support, or at least didn't used to). Downside: once you've got a spreadsheet with really informative charts, it's sometimes hard to share, because saving it as .xlsx breaks some of them. :(
Oh, another nifty feature of gnumeric: if you save it in its uncompressed format, it's literally .xml (good both for version control and for scripting certain kinds of things)
I wouldn't recommend deploying ublock on customer machines. Or at least ask what their workflow is first. There are a ton of SaaS sites that break with ad locking enabled.
I run firefox+UBO+privacy badger on my machines, and the only sites I've had to disable my privacy extensions in the last few years for were work related, B2B SaaS apps. A few years ago I pushed UBO to user machines (Chrome on win10) at work, and had a ton of user issues. I finally had to disable it, it wasn't a net benefit to us. It's not just a 'turn it on and leave it alone' thing, and people don't always think or remember to try toggling it off and reloading the page when they encounter issues.
That said, it's insane to me to be paying MS for a database with a 10GB limit, but I've seen their price lists. I've also worked with small businesses that don't have in-house IT, and they just end up overpaying for crappy service for many of those things.
I hope this win11 migration causes more MSPs and consultants to move small businesses over to linux though, MS has been predatory on pricing for business customers for far too long and with as much work has migrated to a browser there will be way less issues switching than there were years ago.
If they don't remember the two-click procedure for toggling ublock on a website that they want to be using, they weren't paying attention when they were told or showed that, and all they need is a remedial work training session to hammer it in.
I mean, easier said than done. We pay accountants because they are good at their specialized field. They have knowledge and experience I don't, and there's certainly things that are obvious and simple to them that I don't know 9r remember.
It's really easy to just say it's the LUsers fault and make pebkac jokes, and I definitely enjoy BOFH style humor, but honestly not everyone will remember the 30 seconds of training to go into this menu and toggle off an extension if netsuite throws a cryptic error or won't behave properly. I find it's better to have some empathy for other people, not everyone thinks like a computer and connecting 'I have this error message full of gibberish about API calls' and 'the IT guy mentioned 2 months ago that if a site isn't loading, I need to turn off this thing'.
As someone who uses adblock, it is likely that they will encounter this problem every day. A massive amount of sites don't work or don't work fully with adblock. They can be trained to "whenever a site doesn't seem to work, try to turn of adblock for the site as a first measure". They won't forget it because they will do it every day.
Not defending it but for clarity: it’s SQL Server Express that has the 10GB limit, and it’s free. They’re staying under that limit so they DON’T have to pay Microsoft. Aside from the Windows license, presumably.
Thanks for clarifying. Looks like the jump to standard is 989/year (if I'm reading Microsoft's confusing pricing sheet correctly). That's enough of a jump that it would definitely be a budget item for a lot of business. And migrating to a different DB engine isn't often an easy task, but keeping a DB maintained under a size limit sounds like a PITA and prone to accidental deletion of needed data. I definitely don't envy someone having to deal with that.
> There are a ton of SaaS sites that break with ad locking enabled.
Never had one and I have been using uBlockOrigin for a decade. If a SaaS doesn't work with it, report it to them or skip it (if not already vendor locked on it).
You have sqlite, mariadb/mysql, postgres and more just for mostly traditional SQL. Then you have the others ... 8)
It's time for change. VMware have tossed themselves off into limbo and MS seem hell bent on alienating a vast swathe of humanity with W11's requirements - weirdest A/B test ever.
Yeah. I just tried LibreWolf recently and it comes with Ublock preinstalled. I think I am going to install that with some relaxed privacy settings. Libreoffice by default for sure.
If you're going to do this, set them up with something they can get commercial support for.
IMO, if a user's needs can be met with a Chromebook, Linux + a browser + email + Zoom/or whatever would suit them well.
I think you're going to have a hard sell if they rely on Office or other Windows-only software, and although well meaning, it might be doing them a disservice if they can't run the software they're accustomed to.
What are the arguments for Office at the small business or individual level, as opposed to Libre Office? For most users, they'll be able to reacclimate in a matter of hours to near 100% competence. And they now are in an ecosystem that won't constantly try to squeeze you for rent.
I think this is even more true in the era of LLMs, because on the rare difference somebody might get hung up on - there's no longer real need for support. LLMs absolutely excel at questions like 'In MS Office I can do [x] to achieve [y]. How do I do that in Libre Office?'
Sadly in small business Microsoft have a lock because no SMB wants to be the awkward outlier whose IT makes them hard to do business with.
For example, to be that supplier that whose documents never quite look quite right or who always struggles with the docusign /PDF /email /spreadsheet /whatever whatever.
For an SMB, fitting in with the de facto IT herd that is represented by your customers and partners is essential for survival. Sure, some SMBs do decide to buck the trend and move over, but it's hard and not for the faint hearted.
Time will tell if this problem solves itself as 365 becomes a pure web app and Windows becomes an RDP-like Cloud PC.
The irony of Bill Gates vision of a Personal computer where you run what you like and not what the mainframe gives your terminal becoming Windows where you consume what you are told to is not lost on me.
Generally nobody should exchange Office docs anyway, I find it much more professional to exchange PDFs. I use MS arial so my PDFs made with LibreOffice look immaculate on any device. I think people are really shit for being so attached to their stupid office. I could not sell my dad on LibreOffice though. He'd rather pay 100 EUR/yr than learn to use new software.
By default an Arial clone is present, ideally Arial is specified as a valid replacement font in the PDF if the user does not have the Arial clone present (Arial itself is a clone, but that is another story).
It would require deeper investigation to see if this is actually the case. I've always wondered about this.
PDF/A has given me all kinds of issues (windows users get incorrect glyp placement with very bad results). Regular PDF has worked fine for me.
> What are the arguments for Office at the small business or individual level, as opposed to Libre Office?
You have to open and edit documents you get from outside of the office. Clients regularly send me spreadsheets that don't work in Libreoffice, for example.
If it makes their decision makers fuzzy in the stomach to pay for a suite of office software, consider SoftMaker.
Create a 'showroom', virtual through network screen sharing or physical if possible. Demo machines where you can let customers get a bit of immediate experience with GNOME, Xfce and possibly something more. You can walk them through checking their email, creating a document and doing a bit of web browsing.
Don't front 'Linux', it's a tainted word that is of no use to typical public sector and small to medium business people, preferably don't mention it. Instead talk about your solutions being secure, cheap, enterprise grade, customisable, long term supported, things like that.
The article lists 4 Linux distros. I think the most important thing is to recommend just one distro, DE, window server combo, don't know which one but it has to be carefully thought out. They're all coming from the same thing.
The Linux choice matrix is confusing even for programmers. Like I can understand the pieces in theory, but in practice with hardware, user-installed software, varying degrees of compatibility between components, and updates...
Choose the right distro and automate updates of possible. Mint is the softest landing for Windows users. But they never ever ever ever update anything on their own.
Get a distro with atomic updates, preferably an immutable one like Aurora[1]. Updates are automated and can't break your system. And in the rare event something does happen, you can easily boot the previous version right from the boot menu, no need for any scary commands or technical intervention.
I was thinking about setting up a package as part of the system build to do remote maintenance and I wondered if manually doing those updates every six months would be too long of a window. That way if something breaks, I can visit the customers location to fix it if I have to.
It can't. The device is in my room and making noise when on. If that device wakes up and wakes me up, it's either getting a force shutdown (breaking the update) or getting in the trash.
Plus the device is generally left in suspend mode, so shutting it down would interrupt my workflow.
Updates on Linux distros are not really a problem. You can work the whole time and just run updates in the background. You can even switch to a newer Linux kernel, without closing any userspace programs.
The Snap store on Ubuntu is quite good. Has Spotify, VS code, Blender, Chromium.
LibreOffice has a tabbed UI setting that mimics Office (easy to enable). Personally I love LibreOffice, something about it resonates with me. Everybody who liked office 2003 and could never get used to the newer weird ribbon UI in Office will love the default LibreOffice. Those who love the ribbon can enable the tabbed UI bar in LibreOffice. Only complaint is that performance is not as fluid as it could be.
I avoid snap myself because I use apt, but apt is a hard sell and arguably not ideal as well. E.g. I added Spotify repos which in theory could break other packages. In practice this doesn't happen (probably due to Ubuntu essentially freezing major versions for packages in their releases).
Perhaps https://zorin.com/os/ might be a nice distro for your customers. It has 2 UI options: one that is close to macOS and one that looks more like Windows.
you should look into the idea that you are a business, using linux installs in a way that may be subject to license.
if you promote, facillitate, provide resources for installation free of charge, thats probably fine. providing a system for sale, with linux pre-installed, may require, at least some attribution.
so if someone takes our freely available stuff, bundles it with a newly assembled system, and sells them, at a marked up price, like normal business does, it wont be an issue if no mention is made of GPL2 and what that means for the end user.
the idea that positive changes are made available to everyone, is not yet broadly salient. at least now, poster is probably aware of that condition.
you seem to be up on GPL2 , what happens when someone packages distros on disk or stick, and sells them for profit ? thats something to be aware of as well.
They stick the licenses in the back of whatever pack of documents are used during the sale. Heck, print it on the back of the work order in small print with a gray font.
On my motorcycle, there’s an option to view the software licenses used on the bike. The GPL is in there somewhere. So are a lot of other things.
And, no, during checkout at the dealer, we didn’t spend any time talking about software licenses.
As a bundler you’re obligated to provide the licenses. You’re not obliged to point them out, highlight them, point folks to links, or archives, or explain how they work or what rights users may have.
ok, so someone makes the license available for end user to read or not, thats one down for providers responsibility.
now the next is the nature of linux as a common good, generated by many contributors over some time. is it acceptable for anyone to turn a profit from distributing copies of linux on media, or as a component of a retail unit, for an additional price ?
how does that scale up? suppose thousands of ISOs or live distros are sold, enriching the seller by some thousands of dollars, is that ok?
could i, or you, or anyone, burn a couple hundred disks, or rufus thumbdrives, then sell them for $40 each, and have no concerns ?
the submission, links to what is clearly, a profit oriented business. what limitations exist? none if you just pack a GPL2 in with it? can he charge a fee as if he is selling linux to the end user? is public awareness, and availability a suitable contra for financial profit from sale of a product of many contributions from many individuals over many years?
Yes, it is fine. Thousands of companies include GPL’ed software in their products including Red Hat, a big contributor to FOSS. The GPL explicitly allows it. The FSF has said it’s OK as long as you provide the license and a copy of the source code. It’s not an issue.
You may find it morally objectionable to sell distributions of free software for a fee but for F/OSS licensing in no way forbids that.
GPL version 3 explicitly says "you may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey". The MIT license also explicitly allows selling the work.
No other free or open source license forbids selling either. In fact the Open Source Definition from OSI expressly says: "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources."
Linux distributions have been commercially sold for decades. Red Hat built its entire RHEL business on that, even when they still played nicer with open source. (Of course the key really was the support they provided to their paying customers but I think you still needed to pay to get your hands on RHEL anyway.)
Of course the problem you'd be facing if you wanted to sell free software at a significant price would be that since you can't forbid redistribution of the copies you sold (and you need to provide source code), someone else can take what you sell and redistribute it for free. So you can only really sell other people's free software if you either get ignorant people to buy it despite the same thing being available for free elsewhere, or if you provide something else on top of it that people are willing to pay for.
That severely limits the possibilities of making big bucks by just selling free software developed by others.
Perhaps the community is philanthropic to the point of providing free software for other people to sell. But the community or the authors of the licenses aren't naive. The possibility has been known from the start, as was the fact that it's after all quite difficult to charge a lot of money for selling something when free downloads are also almost guaranteed to exist.
I'd be a lot more concerned about how volunteers assume active maintenance burden and responsibility for software libraries that are used for free by just about every software company on the planet.
I don't see anything about trinsic2's (or anybody else's) promoting Linux or installing it on customers' computers that would be in contradiction with open source, even morally. I certainly don't see how a "license" could be required for doing so when the individual licenses of each included piece of software already permit commercial distribution. The only way he might need a separate license would be if he installed a distribution that's actually not entirely open source and bundles proprietary components that are not freely distributable.
thank you, that reinforces the idea that selling a "freeware" is how you harvest bad karma from your customers, it makes common sense. you want to provide value and pertinent disclosure to your customers.
theres nothing wrong with a wage for time and effort.
i think contributors could probably handle free coffees extended toward acknowledgement of the effort.
> thank you, that reinforces the idea that selling a "freeware" is how you harvest bad karma from your customers
Well, you should, because doing so generally requires exploitation of the ignorant or an outright scam.
But the additional value provided might be as simple as (pre)installing the OS and making sure it works with the hardware. Or transferring the customer's data from their old OS for them. I see nothing wrong with charging for those. I might not pay for them since I can easily do them myself but they can be valuable services to others.
Hypothetically you could also sell copies of a distro on physical media to somewhere with poor internet access and it would be fine. People did that in the 90's even in rich countries.
Of course it all sort of depends on how much you charge and for what. You probably still couldn't charge $100 just for the copy without some kind of exploitation since informed people would figure out cheaper ways of getting it.
And of course if you just took an existing distro, changed its name and branding to RolphOS without adding anything of value, and then sold ISO images for $100 to the ignorant by presenting it as your unique special OS, you would get a bad name in the community. It probably still wouldn't violate copyright if all the software were open source, you didn't claim copyright for anything you didn't write and you retained the original licenses, but it would be scammy.
Can you say specifically what you this there is to be concerned about, and why you think it is a problem? Just asking questions like this is not an effective warning, I think. We should be direct, to avoid spreading uncertainty and doubt.
>you seem to be up on GPL2 , what happens when someone packages distros on disk or stick, and sells them for profit ? thats something to be aware of as well.
Assuming that someone has customers, they have a viable business model, that's what happens.
That was, in fact, the business model of most Linux distros before we were all terminally online.
Don't be shy. Tell us what you're concerned about and why you think that's an issue.
Are you implying some sort of illegality or breach of license?
Yes, you are allowed to sell devices with Linux on them. I’m shocked that you think otherwise. Android is pushing Linux to billions of devices and doesn’t have to pay anything.
So I have to decided to promote Linux over Windows for computers I build for customers. If you have any suggestions on how I can make this promotion, better let me know.