• gerdesj@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    I use Linux (Arch actually) as my daily driver - I’m the MD of a small IT business in the UK. I have at least one employee who is asking me to create a Linux standard deployment to replace Windows because they don’t like it anymore - W11 is quite divisive.

    For a corp laptop/desktop you might need Exchange email - so that might be Evolution with EWS. You’ll want “drive letters” - Samba, Winbind and perhaps autofs. You’ll need an office suite - Libre Office works fine. There’s this too: https://cid-doc.github.io/ for more MS integration - if that’s your bag.

    I often see people getting whizzed up about whether LO can compete with MSO. I wrote a finite (yes, finite) capacity scheduler for a factory in MS Excel, back in 1995/6 - it involved a lot of VBA and a mass of checksums etc. I used to teach word processing and DTP (Quark, Word, Ventura and others). LO cuts it. It gets on my nerves when I’m told that LO isn’t capable by someone who is incapable of fixing a widow or orphan or for whom leading and kerning are incomprehensible.

    • Roopappy@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      I remember back in 2017, I didn’t really need any big desktop apps anymore. All I used was Salesforce, Netsuite, O365, Postman… I asked my company to just give me a Chromebook. Now I hate Chromebooks and I could very much do my job on a Linux distro mainly using web apps if needed.

      My IT dept would never allow it because they can’t install security software on it. Obviously I’d be pretty safe from malware, but they’d have to trust that I set up firewalls and password protection because they couldn’t enforce a group policy, and their data loss prevention tools wouldn’t work.

      • cyberpunk007@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Not as “safe” as you think in that regard (I use arch btw), the reason they don’t want it is because you lose control as the administrator. Once everyone is running some flavour of Linux and people report problems, guess who’s gotta look at it? The IT department. It’s a management nightmare compared to windows.

        • Roopappy@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          As arch users, we would never need the help of some low-level IT person though. That would be ridiculous.

          • cyberpunk007@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Good point. The company would not only save money by not buying windows, but by not even having an IT department