I’m just tired. On the last post about having Linux at our work, many people that seems to be an IT worker said there have been several issues with Linux that was not easy to manipulate or control like they do with Windows, but I think they just are lazy to find out ways to provide this support. Because Google forces all their workers to use Linux, and they have pretty much control on their OS as any other Windows system.
Linux is a valid system that can be used for work, just as many other companies do.
So my point is, the excuse of “Linux is not ready for workplaces” could be just a lack of knowledge of the IT team and/or a lack of intention to provide to developers the right tools to work.
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Do you know how much cost is involved in developing a peace of software?
Get what you need > a lot of time and good view of the company is needed.
Then either get a company to do it > expensive + no control on the software.
Or/
Make it yourself > extremely expensive + control on the software.
Get the right people > hiring campaign > expensive
Then these hired people represent more people to pay each month > expensive.
If there aren’t right people, you need to teach the devs how to work on it > expensive formations and it’s done on the working time, so double expensive.
Then time invested in creating the Linux distro adapted to the company > time, testing, mistakes, redo, undo… expensive.
(let’s not forget about taxes and obligations towards the new workers).
And then factor in that it needs a team to maintain it, to prevent future compatibility issues or vulnerabilities, which is also expensive.
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Do you know how much money Google has? It’s enough to do whatever with that, even just keep the people away from competition.
Why Google did that or if it’s even true? Not sure.
However Google is a big tech which develops software for a multitude of platforms, even Linux. They work on their own Linux mod : Android.
So they have all the people already in the company to do whatever they want on Linux.
They also have specific needs which may not need windows.
We however use excel and the advanced feature Power query and power Bi. So as long as a Foss alternative doesn’t get to the level of the current insanely powerful excel and power bi, we’ll be stuck on windows.
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Sure. But google does waste money if it brings them profit. It would be rather called an investment.
However the example of Google is extremely bad, because it can only be applied to very large tech companies who already have people developing for Linux.
It’s not a waste of money, it’s a bad example.
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They can’t really do that, mostly because it’s not “just 1 person”.
There are a lot of costs going into maintaining the os, apps, custom software, and training for the employees.
Google is giant, and has a huge amount of money. They can afford to spend the costs of training, modifying software, or developing other software for their needs if it reduces their future costs.
A smaller company don’t have all those funds, they wouldn’t be able to invest as much into switching to Linux and maintaining the custom software or finding new software and training.
When people switch to another software, there is also a period of low productivity, when these same people are still discovering the software, and cannot do everything as fast as before. That is also creating additional costs.
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I won’t comment on point 2 as I think that has been answered suffiently. On the final point Linux support is more expensive. First line Linux support pays better than first line windows support because well. It is still nieche so workers can command better pay.
You will also have to go through your whole application library and make sure it works, if it doesn’t can you get it to work or do you have to move applications? That will be expensive and time consuming, more than likely someone does something once a year which is really really important who gets missed and you swapped over 6 months ago and now you have to hack a way for this process to work in 2 weeks to meet the deliverable.
This isn’t including training your staff. You have to retrain everyone which is going to be expensive. To be blunt a lot of regular users barely know how Windows works and any change to their way of working is going to be hell. Then you have the cost of retraining the whole IT department which is going to cost more than the regular users.
Sticking with what you know may not be the right thing to do but it usually is the safest option.
Don’t get me wrong I would love Linux to take over the office space but I can’t see that happeing in the next 20 years. Maybe in a startup it’ll work but, moving from something so entrenched in your company is a very big and very scary ask.