Sell Me on Linux

I posted this as a comment in another post but when I got done I realized it would probably just be better as its own post. I’m sure I could find the answers I need myself but frankly I trust the userbase here more than most online articles.

As my username hints at, I’m a lawyer. I’m considering starting my own firm as a solo practitioner. I need a computer and/or laptop for it, and as a new business my budget would be pretty tight. I’ve mostly only ever used windows, but I’m getting fed up with the bullshit, so I’m considering going with Linux.

I assume Linux is capable of doing everything I need, which is primarily handling word documents, viewing PDFs, watching evidence videos, and online research. But my concern is that some of the more commonly used video types might have trouble on Linux, or that some of the word document templates I use in Windows might have compatibility issues.

I’m also nervous about using an OS I’m not familiar with for business purposes right away.

So I guess I’m asking a few questions. What is a reliable yet affordable option to get started? Are my concerns based in reality or is Linux going to be able to handle everything windows does without issues? What else might I need to know to use Linux comfortably from the get go? Is it going to take a lot of time and effort to get Linux running how I need it to?

For reference, I do consider myself to be somewhat tech-savvy. I don’t code or anything, but I’ve built my last two home computers myself and I’m not scared of general software management, I just don’t make it myself.

So, yeah, sell me on Linux, please.

radioactiveradio,

Two words “No Advertisements”

the_third, (edited )

I mean, who would have thought 10 years ago that this would one day be a valid reason to switch away from the OS with the biggest marketshare. Weird times.

olafurp,

Get the list of programs you commonly use and figure out if they’re on Linux or have alternatives. Libreoffice, VLC and Okular are good for your case. If you find it limiting and need MS features then browser Office 365 is very good.

The best option would be to buy a used laptop and install Linux, Linux works great on old hardware so you could find something 3-7y old and it’ll run very well.

If you’re coming from Apple try anything with Gnome that’s popular (Ubuntu, Fedora).

If you’re coming from windows try anything that uses KDE (Kubuntu, Fedora w KDE, KDE neon).

If you don’t tinker with things under the hood generally you’ll have a painless polished experience.

Being able to get a modern OS that runs smoothly on a 200$ used laptop is the major selling point for you, rest is extra.

plantedworld,

We use browser office 365 at work. It’s on a Windows computer. I gotta say it sucks ass if your stuff doesn’t all live in an associated onedrive. We have a shared drive that common files live in and accessing them from the browser office is a mess.

constate368, (edited )

It’s about being in the free software ecosystem, which is really a licensing issue.

Forcing people to contribute their modifications to software when they are editing free software ensures we’re never dependent on the decisions of one entity. This is what the GNU General Public License (GPL) is all about.

If we don’t like what someone did, we can take that part out and redistribute a better version that we can continue to modify. This might not matter to someone who doesn’t program, but it should.

You don’t have to be the one to get your hands dirty with code. Just being a user in the ecosystem opens you up to these benefits. Other people are going to take advantage of them, and you can just piggyback on their work.

I, personally, think it’s always just a matter of time before businesses make products worse by charging more/giving less. Look at Adobe. Look at Microsoft. Look at Apple. All of them want to lock people into endless subscriptions because they’re dependent on their ecosystem. What happens when Adobe decides they’re not charging enough for photoshop? They charge more, and everyone just has to deal with it. Same goes for Office. Same goes for Apple, they just do it the old-fashioned way by charging for the latest versions and making you buy new hardware.

krash,

In addition to all the sound advice you’ve been give so far, you should have a support contract in case you run into problems and ideally, contract someone to set up your laptop so you have proper encryption, backup etc. You have to consider both meeting the business deadlines, and ensuring the confidentiality and availability of the data. If you want to do this yourself, contract someone to validate your configuration.

wesley,

I’m a software engineer, and I’ve used Linux on my computer for work before when my company allowed Linux installs on their computers (most don’t in my experience). I don’t recommend it for you.

For me, my main productivity tools, even proprietary ones, run natively on Linux. I very very rarely have to do anything involving word processing. When I do open source or in-browser word processors are enough. Windows can also be a constant headache to use in a lot of software development settings. It’s a horrible development environment. I try to avoid working on Windows as much as I can.

When something breaks (and on Linux, something eventually will), I have more than a decade of technical experience in computing I can fall back on to fix the issue myself. My work computer has failed to boot before and all I had to diagnose and fix the issue was a black screen with a terminal prompt. Even my company’s outsourced IT company had very little experience with Linux and I was largely on my own to fix it when things went wrong.

For you I don’t think it would make sense for basically all the opposite reasons. I imagine you’ll be doing heavy word processing and editing a lot of documents that need to be formatted correctly. Browser based and open source word processing are probably not going to cut it. I’m not sure if there are any proprietary file formats you may come across in the legal field, but if there are do you want to have to ask people “could you send that in a different format? I can’t open that on Linux.”

If something goes wrong on your machine you may not have all the experience to resolve it quickly on your own which could impact your business. Windows can break too but there’s a lot more support out there and the barrier is much lower to fix most issues (I can’t remember the last time I had to bust out a terminal to fix something on windows)

For all its faults, windows is pretty well set up for your typical use case.

If there’s a compromise here, you could try having a computer running windows and another running Linux. Having a backup in case something goes wrong isn’t a bad idea anyway. Dual booting is also an option. I made it through college for a CS degree with a dual boot Windows+Ubuntu laptop.

Whatever you end up doing, be sure to have a really good plan in place for backing up everything you need, especially files. Your computer can fail you at any time, Windows or Linux.

Matombo,

Ever got that feeling that your PC doesn’t do what you want and that it seems malicous and intentional?

Switch to Linux where at least you know that when you hit a brick wall it’s an honest bug!

Just making some fun ;) But seriously the main reason is switched to Linux is that it at least tries to be the best os for the user, unlike windows or mac os, which tries to be tge best os for the company that is selling it, which just happens to include not pissing of it’s user too much, but a little bit is ok from ms and apples point of view.

alt, (edited )

What is a reliable yet affordable option to get started?

Unfortunately, good affordable hardware on which Linux is properly supported is hard to get by. I’m personally fond of vendors like (in alphabetical order) Framework, NovaCustom, Star Labs, System76, Tuxedo. But other vendors like ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo are known to sell devices that do a considerable job at supporting Linux; consider to check the compatibility/support for their devices through resources like linux-hardware.org.

Are my concerns based in reality or is Linux going to be able to handle everything windows does without issues?

Regarding video types; I don’t think you should have any problems regarding those; on some distros it might not be supported by default, but that should be solvable with a single command. Relying on flatpaks^[1]^ instead is another viable solution and is enabled by default on a lot of distros. Moving on to word document templates; I suppose the suite of cloud-based services found in Microsoft 365 should work regardless. As for the question if the templates would work on LibreOffice, ONLYOFFICE and the like; I simply don’t know. On to familiarity of OS and using it for business purposes; most distros that are friendlier towards newer users have been setup with sane defaults. Therefore, I don’t think there’s a lot that could go wrong as long as you’re interacting with a GUI. When interacting with a command-line interface, note that information found on the internet is often times outdated. Therefore, if you’re hesitant or unsure; consider interacting with the community for some help. We’re all in this together!

is Linux going to be able to handle everything windows does without issues?

You should be totally fine aside from some software that’s known to not support Linux at all.

What else might I need to know to use Linux comfortably from the get go?

Ask yourself the following questions:

  • To what degree are you interested to learn how it all works and to experience what Linux offers?
    • If you see it primarily as a means to an end, then pick a distro that does an excellent job at accommodating your workflow without requiring you to relearn more than necessary.
    • If instead, interest in Linux itself is the main driving force behind the switch, then please be mindful that the Linux rabbit hole is very real.

Is it going to take a lot of time and effort to get Linux running how I need it to?

Somewhat related to the previous question*. Like, there are distros out there that I can install for my grandfather and he wouldn’t even notice the difference. But even some (relatively) mainstream-distros can be daunting for so-called power users of Windows. E.g. I would argue I was your average Windows-user; play games, browse the internet, email, write documents, video-editing, run software required for my studies etc. It took me about two weeks before I was ‘comfortable’ on Linux. And even then, some of the software I used for e.g. video-editing just didn’t want to play nice^[2]^.

So, yeah, sell me on Linux, please.

If you want freedom and control over your devices, there’s simply no viable alternative.

  1. Software management on Linux -at least on the surface- is closer to Android/iOS than to Windows. You should rarely (if at all) feel the need to find software through your browser. Instead, you should interact with so-called package managers. This can be achieved through either a command-line interface or a storefront with a GUI that behaves like those found on Android/iOS etc. Coming back to Flatpak; this is an (upcoming) universal (read: (mostly) distro-agnostic) package manager that tries to solve a lot of problems that traditional package managers have had. There’s still a lot of ongoing work for it to achieve its design-goals to the fullest, but even in its current iteration it works excellent and therefore it’s unsurprising to find it enabled by default on a significant chunk of the Linux landscape. Software that are packaged using this technology are referred to as flatpaks (or flatpak if singular).
  2. In retrospect, this seems to be primarily rooted in the fact that my machine isn’t that powerful in the first place. On Windows, it managed because it was better optimized for it. Unfortunately, on Linux, this was not the case.
inthiseconomy,

Just a quick correction, your framework link goes to system 76.

alt,

Thanks for pointing that out! It has since been fixed.

pineapplelover,

You can get a used thinkpad for a pretty affordable price. Main issue here is OP’s workflow may not accommodate learning Linux while at their job.

indepndnt,

I’m a CPA and my PC runs Linux, but also has a Windows VM for when I need Excel (unfortunately the open source alternatives just don’t cut it, and I’m guessing it’s similar for someone who relies on Word the way accountants rely on Excel), and my work laptop runs Windows.

If you ever edit PDFs with Acrobat Pro, there’s no good Linux equivalent that I’ve found for that either. It can be done, but you’ll need a couple of different programs depending on what you need to edit in the PDF.

In general I’d say that you can run your business in Linux, but it is probably not the best choice.

cyberwolfie,

I love Linux since switching nearly a year ago. Yet, I still once in a while find myself in situations where I screw up and I think to myself “Oh, I’m glad this is not my work computer”. If you have no experience with Linux from before, maybe you should consider getting a personal laptop, install Linux on that, and get comfortable using it before transitioning your business to it. That way, the first time you accidentally uninstall your desktop environment (I managed to do this not once, but twice…), it is not 10 minutes before an important client meeting.

gianni,

As far as video types are concerned, Linux’s multimedia codec support is much wider & more flexible than Windows via Windows Media Player. The app Celluloid for Linux (based on MPV) supports everything under the sun

csm10495,
@csm10495@sh.itjust.works avatar

I don’t think every distro comes with this. How is it a positive in that case? I could install VLC on just about everything (including Windows) and have a similar experience.

gianni,

VLC isn’t a native Windows app, as it isn’t a native Linux app. Celluloid uses native styling on GNOME systems & is super easy to install with any package manager GUI that supports Flatpak. Installing apps on Linux is always easier by a long shot compared to Windows, especially with Flatpak.

I don’t know what is default on most distros, but it is so easy to change in this case that it is hard to even consider the default media player relevant compared to on Windows where there are fewer options for apps like VLC that actually give you a native experience

KISSmyOS,

I’m a big proponent of using Linux, but don’t do it.
A small company I support recently almost went under cause the boss and his former IT provider were both open source enthusiasts and set up his whole network with Linux.

Then he needed a secretary, and all applicants backed out when they heard they’d have to use Linux.
And he couldn’t find an enterprise resource planning software that ran on Linux.

vaselined,

This story sounds so fake

Moobythegoldensock,

If you’re writing Word documents for your own use, to print, or to convert to PDF, you should be able to switch to LibreOffice seamlessly. However, if you’re emailing .docx files with the expectation that others are going to open them, make changes, save them, and send them back to you, you’re going to need Word or things will get messy. Office 365 online is probably your best bet.

I’ll echo what others are saying and tell you to learn linux at home first. Only use it for business when you’re sure it can do everything you need, and even then you might still want to keep a Windows laptop around in case you need it. Even though Linux is great, the rest of the business world still expects you to be able to work within Windows’ ecosystem.

interdimensionalmeme,

Also that fun thing libre office does where it disappears randomly with your work !

Moobythegoldensock,

Never had that happen to me.

interdimensionalmeme,

I tried OpenOffice and LibreOffice 6 times in 20 years and that happened each time.

oldfart,

Was “your work” writing memory corruption exploits in macro editor?

interdimensionalmeme,

Nope simple excel and word stuff and whoops crash to desktop work is gone

yetAnotherUser,

I’ve heard that OnlyOffice Community Edition is Linux-compatible and has better support for Word documents, but I’ve never tried it myself

el_abuelo,

Starting a new business is hard enough as it is - please do not complicated it by adding in something that brings limited tangible benefits to the company, whilst making it unnecessarily harder than what it will be anyway.

Either get fluent now, and then start your business - or start your business with Windows and move on when you’re profitable and can afford the reduction in productively while you learn the ropes.

Do not go anywhere near MacOS - you can’t afford it.

GuyWithLag,

This is solid advice.

Also, the macOS ecosystem is predicated on you being rich enough (or fool enough) to buy it, and everything is nickel-and-dimed.

interdimensionalmeme,

Use Linux and computer will devour your entire life just trying to make that thing you want, to work.

art,
@art@lemmy.world avatar

Sell me on Linux

No. I hate these kind of posts cause if you need to be talked into it, it’s not for you.

If you’re genuinely interested, just grab a distro and boot up a VM. Tinker and explore.

milicent_bystandr,

I disagree. It’s an invitation for Linux users to show what ways we think Linux would suit OP, so they can decide if it’s worth trying.

some_guy, (edited )

I disagree. Someone who isn’t willing to try Linux on their own, or otherwise investigate, just because they’re curious is not ready for the baggage that comes with a new OS. Agreeing with another comment: don’t make this change at the same time as other major changes to your career. That is a recipe for disaster.

I’m a Mac / Linux guy who dislikes Windows. I wouldn’t even suggest getting a Mac at the same time as making huge career changes. And Linux is harder. Not impossible, but no training-wheels. You want something new, but you aren’t really interested in Linux itself.

ETA: That last statement was unfair. Apologies.

EuroNutellaMan,
@EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world avatar

I think posts like these are actually a pretty good way to do research tho.

After all if you want to get a general idea of something the best place to start is by asking the people that actually use that thing.

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