Sell Me on Linux

phx, 7 months ago

My general advice would be: look at the apps you use (or would need to use) on Windows. If you’re generally dealing with word documents, PDF’s, webpages, and videos that are viewable on VLC.

See if LibreOffice/OpenOffice/OnlyOffice on Windows work as expected for the documents. If not, see if M365 through the browser does (your can run Edge on Linux and accessing the MS ecosystems seem to be the primary reason many do so.

If you can’t do those things, Linux may not be for you, or at least may not meet the needs for your work.

For personal use, I’m all with users taking the plunge, seeing if Linux works for them, and/or some the adjustments they need to make. For many, it’s a matter of a different UI for the same applications/tasks, but less invasive while being more customizable. In many cases I dual-booting or a VM, in case that user runs into a special case holding them to Windows (maybe a particular game). You could also dual-boot and flip to Windows if the edge cases it’s needed are few and far between, but you’d still need to make sure to keep both OS’s updated.

For a business user who may face time crunches, the last thing I’d want is for somebody to find out that the proprietary file format they’re provided in the regular course of business only works on a proprietary software that only runs on Windows.

At the very least, grab a cheap windows license (got can purchase legit pro license codes online for cheap and then download the image for a USB installer from MS), run Linux as your primary and keep a Windows install in a VM (i.e. using KVM/libvirtd) for a bit in case edge cases emerge. For those that just need business apps (i.e. not games, graphics-intensive design tools or social hardware) that’ll bridge the gap just fine.

Another option would be to try something like Windows with Ubuntu installed via WSL (subsystem for Linux) and i.e. MobaXterm to access the various Linux graphical apps. However that pretty much gives you access to Linux tools without the OS UI, and all the headaches of running with an MS operating system as the primary.

For my own job, I could go 90%-95% of what I need purely in Linux, with the 5-10% left being stuff like editing Visio documents, screen-sharing with sound or only for a specific app (in our workplace’s conference app). Assuming you only need to join Teams/Zoom/etc conferences with audio and video, that part works fine from browser in either OS.

In short… it’s a business, so I can’t recommend just diving in, but it’s for the same reasons I wouldn’t recommend a business just switch their vehicle fleet to 100% EV’s or move their office to a different city/state/country without a well thought-out transition plan, preferably built in stages. It may work out great and overall be a better experience nearly all the time, but if it prevents work at a crucial moment without a backup plan that can still be a deal breaker.

bastion, 7 months ago

The task question is:

Is Online Office 365 good enough for you? Or, is an ‘almost fully compatible’ word processor enough?

The features are there, but it’s a whole new interface to learn, and if you export to a word document, the document produced may look wonky when viewed in word. OTOH, whatever PDFs you produce, those will look right. And if Online Office 365 is enough, that’s great, because you won’t have to worry about that.

You’ll need to establish a workflow, and others in your office will need to use (and get used to) the same workflow.

It’s not a small leap for an office to take. I love Linux, but check out that it has what you need before you fully commit. Give it a try by dual-booting or by installing it on a secondary system.

jimbo, 7 months ago

watching evidence videos

You might run into some trouble with surveillance videos that require some proprietary video player to play. Not sure how often you come across those.

infinitevalence, 7 months ago

depending on the type most NVR’s are just custom linux builds, so VLC has few issues. I have yet to find an NVR video I could not run on my box, but my sample size is not huge, and its not corporate surveillance level gear im testing with

Holzkohlen, 7 months ago

That a thing? Cause I am gonna believe you. The world is full of dumb ideas like that.

Dwalin, 7 months ago

You can do everything but you will have problems with word documents. There’s online office for better compatability with the caveat of reduced functionality. There’s great compatability with Only Office and WPS Office but its not perfect.

There was a comment recommending Zorin OS and I agree. Its a great distro to switch to from windows. Setup is easy and flathub is included in the software store.

I’d recommend trying Linux on dualboot and see if you can replace windows!

Mechaguana, 7 months ago

Its fun to open the terminal and learning the language of the computer, even if it disagree with you sometimes. Most times. Also i can do anything, including messing it up irreparably!

Joker, 7 months ago

Don’t do it.

First off, I love Linux. It’s my daily driver and I wouldn’t want to use anything else.

But in my past career I was the CIO at a very large firm. Lawyers need Microsoft Office and Windows. If you hire a good assistant or paralegal with word processing experience, they are going to need Microsoft Word. LibreOffice is good, but it’s not a replacement in this scenario. Good word processors are like wizards and will save you hours. It’s not worth it to make them learn something else.

Then there’s drafting software, templating, practice-specific tools, etc. Anything geared for legal is going to run on Windows. What are you using for time entry? What about accounting?

Not to mention, you have some information security obligations under the model rules and you don’t want to mess with that. Although Linux has security advantages over Windows, you still have to take measures to secure it. Maybe that’s easy enough for you to do on your own laptop, but your practice will grow to at least a few staff and an associate. Somebody has to do IT because you’re sure as hell not going to waste billable hours on it.

I had to use Windows in that old gig and it really wasn’t bad. It’s stable, reliable, easy to support. Everyone you hire will have used it before. It’s an unpopular opinion around here, but it’s a quality operating system that’s affordable. I guarantee your cost of ownership will be lower on Windows in your particular situation.

grue, 7 months ago

I’m getting fed up with the bullshit

Frankly, that’s the reason – the original reason, and the most important – to use Free Software. With very few exceptions, the origin story of every Free Software project was somebody getting fed up with a piece of proprietary software either abusing them or just not doing what they wanted it to do. In fact, the entire Free Software movement itself was invented in the first place because Richard Stallman got fed up with Xerox’s bullshit back in the day!

So yeah, there you go: that’s the only reason you need, and you already knew it.

penquin, 7 months ago

Linux is stable if you use a distro that’s known to be stable, example: Linux mint. This is one of the “just works” distros. There are a couple, but I highly recommend mint. Linux can do all of what you need done, from documents, PDFs to viewing all kinds of videos. I’ve never once run into any issue doing any of that. You have libreoffice and onlyoffice that have amazing compatibility with MS office. If anything, you can use the MS office suite online and call it a day. Hell, you can use Google’s office suite, too. PDFs? Zero worries. Videos are good, too. We do have VLC which basically plays anything you throw at it. However, since you have a business and want to make sure things always work, I do recommend that you keep at least one windows machine in the office for just in case. I don’t have a business, but I’ve always had this one laptop that runs windows. I debloated the shit out of it. Blocked all of the telemetry using Microsoft’s own firewall and it’s sitting there for just in case.

Edit: forgot to mention that you are always welcome to come here and ask if you needed help. I find the Lemmy Linux community to be extremely helpful. Everyone jumps in to help every time I had a question.

HubertManne, 7 months ago

zorin os is an out of the box distro that will have all the applications from the start and maximum windows look, feel, and compatibility. https://zorin.com/os/

Pantherina, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

As a lawyer you should always use Linux.

Have a LUKS encrypted hard drive.

Video formats? There literally are VLC, ffmpeg and MPV. Every normal format works on every Distro.

Get most apps from Flathub.org, use any Distro you want but I recommend Fedora Kinoite.

Word documents for sure, PDF editing actually too. PDF editing is cursed in itself, but Okular + PDF arranger + Firefox + sometimes GIMP (for actually censoring) work.

Have a look at Stirling PDF, a project combining all of these effords. Its not yet a fully graphical desktop app but this command will work on Fedora Kinoite:

<span style="color:#323232;">podman run -d 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  -p 8080:8080 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  -v /location/of/trainingData:/usr/share/tesseract-ocr/4.00/tessdata 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  frooodle/s-pdf:latest
</span>

Then you can use StirlingPDF in your browser by opening localhost:8080

Use any modern Linux Distro and stay away from outdated Desktops like Mint (Cinnamon), XFCE, Budgie, Mate etc.

Rustmilian, 7 months ago

MPV* you have VLC twice.

Pantherina, 7 months ago

Hahah lol was tired.

dvdnet89, 7 months ago

if you are using latest nvidia hardware and one of your favourite software does not work on Linux. just stay away from it

FierroGamer, 7 months ago

It’s not windows.

Any bonus points for a concise answer?

EuroNutellaMan, 7 months ago

Others have given you some good advice but I’ll still give you my opinion because more data points is good.

First of all, as others said, it’s better perhaps if you switch your home computer first or try it out on a VM or dual-boot first as you learn how to use it rather than erasing Windows altogether at first. Regardless of your choice I’d recommend giving it a try still.

Affordability is not a concern at all, most Linux Distros are free and they’ll work perfectly fine, usually when you pay for distros you’re either paying for better tech support or to support the distro itself, and a lot of the software that’s on the repos is also free.

Your biggest concern probably would be re-learning the OS. Now, obviously Linux and windows work very differently, for example installing software on Linux is mainly done via an app-store or the terminal. As for graphics, shortcuts, etc, there’s two approaches here, which one is better depends on your preferences. You can either stick to something similiar to windows, so any distro that has Cinnamon, KDE plasma, or Xfce (you will have to move a few stuff and configure it a bit at the beginning) will do well, I’d recommend Linux Mint; or you can do something more different that will force you to learn something new and will tell you visually “Look, I’m not windows, I’m built different!” so something like GNOME (or customize the other DEs to something you like), personally I’m not a fan of GNOME but it works well for your use-case, as any DE will do, in this case I recommend Pop!_OS.

Both of my recommendetions use apt and are debian (through Ubuntu as the middledistro) derivatives btw. This is important because when you encounter a problem or a certain software not being in the repo it is good to look for sources closely related to your distro.

Linux can do everything you mentioned and more, however compatibility with M$ Word documents/etc can be a bit iffy. Personally I always used LibreOffice and aside from some minor annoyances never had issues with it and using .docx but I also don’t work at a professional environment that requires it to work perfectly. However you’re in luck as you can still use M$ office & other stuff from your browser if needed, tho I assume it will have less resources and will require an internet connection (this can be mitigated by working offline with LibreOffice, OpenOffice or any Office suite you like then copy-pasting it to M$ word or whatever), tho I wouldn’t know since I don’t use either and never planning on doing so. There’s also google docs.

Video types should work just fine especially common ones, VLC is a powerful tool. If you’re installing Mint make sure to install the media codecs at install.

Also I recommend learning the terminal, it may seem scary at first but it is easy, fast and will help you troubleshoot. Also accept that you will encounter problem, like in every system, and you’re expected to solve them yourself, this means you can spend a lot of time looking up stuff, learning to look at logs, etc. This will of course take time but it would take as much if not more time on windows too sometimes, on the bright side Linux tends to be a little better at telling you the problem if you know what to look for and also you almost never have to deal with an issue until the company fixes it, you can literally go and fix the code yourself if needs be. Anyways, on this end I recommend using a stable distribution (like the ones I mentioned), stick to the official repos as much as possible, and at install make a separate partition for your home folder, that way worst case scenario you can always just reinstall the OS (takes 15 mins) without losing your files*. Also, this goes for everything and I can’t stress it enough: MAKE FREQUENT BACKUPS, and better yet do them in multiple places: Proton Drive, external hard disk/USB, an other drive on your PC, whatever just have at least one, preferably 2+, place that isn’t your computer or its main drive be your backup space. This goes for Windows too and even though I assume you know it I will still say it because it’s extremely important and always overlooked.

*Unless you erase the partition by mistake or something.

P.S. also given the nature of your job, you might want to encrypt the hard disk (write the password somewhere and make sure to use a password specifically for it and one you can remember, password managers/generators don’t help here) and learn to use the gpg command when you need to encrypt and sign documents.

immibis, 7 months ago

@Sage_the_Lawyer @linux I don't think selling is how it works. You have to be frustrated enough to seek out alternatives to the mainstream, then you find Linux and try it for yourself and it works okay.

Things made by billion dollar companies with a profit motive are almost always going to be better than things made by random people in their spare time - except in areas like privacy.

You're allowed to try it out before committing to it though.

TrickDacy, 7 months ago

A lot of people lately have whined that Linux people are zealoted evangelists. You sure wouldn’t know that in this thread… Most popular jist of responses is “make sure its the right tool for the job first”