"If it was going to happen, it would have by now".

This is where not having a guiding strategy *doesn't* work.

I've been using Linux at home for (checks) 19 years. In those years there hasn't been a single role or outfit I have worked for that could have adopted Linux even if they wanted to.

I pointed out the missing bits in 2005 to tumbleweed (and some pretty nasty comments on this very forum). And they are still missing. And without them, you will never ever get a corporate wonk to start looking at the idea of moving to Linux - despite the eye watering savings in MS licensing.

Be curious to see if any other Regtard can suggest what components Linux desktop lacks for use in a corporate setting. It's not AD - amazingly that's covered.

"...can suggest what components Linux desktop lacks for use in a corporate setting"

One of my employers runs (almost*) everything through MS 365/Sharepoint with bolt on subscriptions from other providers (course materials mainly). I just log in using Chromium on a Linux laptop and all fine (well as fine as Teams ever is but no worse than Windows users).

(*) A recent change in the finance/HR systems means that there is ONE function that I can only reach from a computer that is inside the employer's network (and therefore runs Windows 11 for Education). Fortunately I don't need to access it often. Just pop into an actual office and done.

I don't suppose they would let you use Remote Desktop to connect to that machine?

Curious what it was that was missing in 2005, and what's still missing now?

The biggest blocker everywhere I've worked was always MS office. Specifically Outlook and Excel. My feelings about those two particular abominations and the way that so many office workers are suffering what I would best describe as Stockholm syndrome regards to them are well documented at this point, but those have been the big blockers for me.

I have worked somewhere where we very successfully managed nearly 1000 Linux desktops and that was the case as far back as 2012 - but even there, which I still remember extremely fondly because of how incredibly easy managing Linux desktops at that scale actually was - we had another 100 or so Windows desktops explicitly to provide MS office to specific members of staff who refused to couldn't work without it.

I rather like Excel - but I'm just at home in LO Calc. So that's an easy switch. Outlook is different because of the various capabilities and hooks into other programs, making it difficult to easily replace. (Undoubtedly that's intentional.) I've never used Thunderbird's calendar (no use for an electronic calendar at home), but that might be a viable option.

These days I've finally succumbed to using the equivalent calendar in SeaMonkey. Works fine and syncs to the Nextcloud Pi which then syncs to the phone. It would be a good idea to have a built-in WebDAV server for those who don't have Nextcloud.

I want to start out by saying that I detest Microsoft. They are the root of all evil in the universe as far as I'm concerned (or maybe Google?).

I'm in the process of migrating everything in my private side of IT away from anything Microsoft. The few remaining Windows PCs here at the house still run Windows 7, and only for a couple of pieces of software that I don't have Linux replacements for (and before anyone says "but you can use...", no I can not).

That said, I've used Outlook at work (mostly) but also at home for about 25 years. I've recently tried Thunderbird as a replacement for Outlook. It was dreadful. I also tried BetterBird, which is considerably better than Thunderbird in my opinion. Neither of them are all that great. I spent a week trying every open source email client out there, and chose BetterBird. It is sort of tolerable at best. I could spend the whole morning listing all of the problems/shortcomings/bugs I've run into with it.

As terrible as the new versions of Outlook are, (this is painful to write) none of the open source email clients can replace it.

despite the eye watering savings in MS licensing

Hardly. A MS365 "full fat" licence is what £22* a month, £264 a year assuming you're not big enough to blag a discount? I'll ignore the cheaper web-only licences, because the web-only apps are total and utter crap. Now, what's your all-in costs for all IT in a typical large company - usually around £2-3k a year. Even that all-IT is a fraction of the average office worker cost. So yes, savings to make, and they'll add up if you have enough employees - but when netted off against the fact that 90%+ of your workforce are already familiar with Office, why take the risk? When it all goes to shit (for any reason) the sales director or FD will be blaming the move away from MS, and the CIO is in the very hot seat. Why do it?

What is there in an M365 to FOSS move (or even paid Linux) that is in any way career enhancing for a CIO?

* Admittedly there's other costs such as exchange licencing and the other ways MS bilk corporates, but there's notable costs for a corporate trying to configure and run a FOSS equivalent.

I don't really care what the clients are running but I do consider the move towards M365 as an example of systemic risk and, therefore, very much something that CIOs should be aware of.

You haven't costed replacing all your W10 only PCs with W11-supporting and then replacing them again when AI-specific requirements become essential and W11 support is discontinued, just to make sure you get the message.

Realistically, given the timescales, most corporates and many SMBs will have replaced the majority of machines which don't meet the W11 requirements.

We've not got many left now, and all of them are heading towards six years old.

I'm not in favour of the hardware requirements, but I think they actually hit home users much more because they tend to keep computers for longer than would be the case i most businesses.

So £264 a year per employee, plus Exchange, OneDrive, etc. isn't a big deal for a 1000+ employee company? There's also less risk of data leakage (what exactly is Microsoft slurping?), and if you can ditch MS Office in preference for something FOSS, you can then move to a FOSS OS for an additional savings per employee/machine.

And how much does it cost to develop and then support that FOSS solution? And what can't it do which M365 can, especially around remote working? With Sharepoint, the users can access the files from anywhere, and the M365 apps are designed to hook into it. Somethign equivalent built in-house is going to be time-consuming, expensive, and won't have the integration with the desktop apps.

The MS monopoly is not a good thing, but it's operationally far, far easier for companies with standard IT requirements than putting together some home-brew Linux setup.

There are also no Linux equivalents to Azure AD and Intune. The move to people working in various locaitons, including from home, makes these things all the more important.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that any company implement everything themselves. There are some perfectly good alternative solutions for pretty much everything you list. Sharepoint itself is an abomination and horrible to work with just for sharing files. What does Active Directory do that something based on LDAP can't? And there are plenty of alternatives to Intune for device management.

I think the clients are key for user acceptance, but there are alternatives for many things: just look at how they manage with mobile devices.

I really am worried by the corporate march to M365 and the updated "nobody got sacked for buying IBM" approach. I am convinced that, as more and more stuff moves onto Microsoft's platform, the risks will just get bigger and we will see some catastrophic failures.

>>MS365 "full fat" licence is what £22* a month

Other price plans are available... the last I paid for an MS365 license was...... ~£5 per year per seat. About the same as the Adobe Everything (Premier, Photoshop, After Effects - the whole shooting match) license... I would show you the bills but that would dox myself, which would be stupid.

"In those years there hasn't been a single role or outfit I have worked for that could have adopted Linux even if they wanted to."

That's some serious hyperbole.

They could have adopted it, at any time. It would have cost money to transition, they would have had to made some small sacrifices, not unlike ANY upgrade or system change project.

But saying they COULDN'T have done it is just wrong. They didn't want to.

Any one single item you might consider a blocker will have an alternative that may be less preferable, but equally as viable.

I've yet to actually work in a single place where I couldn't have just replaced everything with Linux overnight, let the users scream and shout for a few weeks, and then business would have just carried on as normal. Maybe you'd have to swap out a banking integration with a dumb bank that only knows about Windows, or had to change the office suite to a web version, etc. but saying that not one place you've ever worked could have gone Linux is just a flat-out lie.

What you mean is: "without impact", but the impact of changing any system is pretty much there, even going from Windows to Windows, or merging two Windows networks, or whatever.

Well, I see your hyperbole comment and direct you to Munich.

https://www.theregister.com/2017/11/13/munich_committee_says_all_windows_2020/

Munich: Politics ...

Politics of the "How would it be if we set up a regional office here?" sort.

But saying they COULDN'T have done it is just wrong. They didn't want to.

In my until-recently $WORKPLACE I could lot onto any company PC anywhere (office, the the road, at home, or remote login to a virtual machine) and see the same desktop and the same folder of my stuff. I could use my work phone number for incoming and outgoing calls. Is all of that do-able with Linux only?

I've worked at a company that used Linux on everything, all the way up to the CEO's laptop. It worked very well, actually. It was a software/electronics company, with about 40 staff in 2011, so not a big company by any means.

But just because Microsoft has tools for lazy sysadmins and Evil HR, doesn't mean a company actually needs them, if it has a decent sysadmin and actually trusts its own staff.

If open source software doesn't fit your corporate culture, I'd suggest changing the corporate culture, rather than buying Kool-Aid from Microsoft.

Anyway, to play your little anonymous guessing game, I'd hazard a guess that some of the "missing components" you are referring to are:

Distributed Filesystem (DFS), the corporate version of SMB. Not sure if Samba/CIFS supports this fully, but it's pretty close.. As for Linux-native alternatives, NFS sucks, I agree. There are better alternatives, though. Coda perhaps? Or else you can still stick with CIFS

Device/TPM provisioning - this is an EvilHR(tm) feature that can be dispensed with, or can be provided by the firmware if you really need it

Group Policy i.e. setting local user permissions at a fine-grained level. This is a LazyIT (tm) feature that can be dispensed with, if you trust and educate your staff.

Software provisioning e.g. with the Win11 App framework - ensuring that local software is kept up to date and consistent - there are plenty of ways to do this without Microsoft, but it does require the sysadmin to have a clue and get out of bed once in a while ..

Corporate VPN? That's well-covered by NetworkManager these days.. I don't know what else you could be thinking of.. Printer drivers? Nope, that works far better than Windows now.. Teams/Slack/etc are all there.. Libreoffice is there.. Maybe you'd miss the "interactive collaborative features" of MS Office, but if you want those (I don't), they are there on the Web version. There's even a OneDrive client for Linux that works nicely - But then again you are talking about "since 2005"..

so.. maybe you have an antique plotter that only works on GPIB with a kernel-mode Windows driver? Or some other unusual peripheral with proprietary Windows NT compatible driver support? Or antique software that relies on ActriveX/COM, or kernel-mode libraries for DRM reasons. I do have some software that works perfectly in Wine except for the USB DRM Dongle. If only there were some standard way of doing that! Well there are, but not enough vendors use them. Lack of third-party vendor support is a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom..

Sorry, but you really don't seem to have a clue about the realities, e.g.:

"Group Policy i.e. setting local user permissions at a fine-grained level. This is a LazyIT (tm) feature that can be dispensed with, if you trust and educate your staff."

I assume you've never actually done user support? Many staff are simply not going to have a clue how to configure anything, and might well inadvertently change something (depending how locked dow the system is). And what if you have 200 laptops scattered here, there and everywhere and need to make a configuration change? What do you propose? Remote support session with each of the 200 users?

And user training, of course. Libre Office may be fine for the readership of forums like this, but it's sufficiently different from MS Office that many users are going to need training.

The bottom line is that if this Linux utopia was all that some on here claim it to be, companies would be rushing to move to it. The reality is there are many reasons why most businesses would not consider it a realistic option.

| And what if you have 200 laptops scattered here, there and everywhere and need to make a configuration change?

I had a puppet agent running as root (which the users were not allowed to have ) on the laptops with a public endpoint that it would poll for changes every 15 minutes. If I needed to change a machine I'd update the manifest and the next time the thing checked in it would update the machine config accordingly. This had the double benefit of the fact that if someone changed something I didn't want them to change but it wasn't practical to completely lock (Common ones like the VPN config where the username was something people might realistically need to update, but the host address absolutely was not) it would simply change it back.

It was, in fact, the same system we used to update the desktops and servers - even the switches by way of a switch management bastion. Everything was IaC. Everything was version controlled. All endpoints could be swapped from the "Prod" to "Test" branches as required. It even managed major version upgrades entirely remotely. We offered a "Things done fucked up" boot option that would connect to a sftp site, validate the machine certificate for your host, and download you the correct and pre-configured installed should something go terribly wrong. It was - in short - a metric fuck ton more reliable and convenient than AD was, where Microsoft had a nasty tendency to change what settings did between one version and the next, and occasionally just plain take them away from me.

Now, this was not cheap - at least in terms of man-hours spent getting the thing to that state. Basically the entire infra was totally custom and there were effectively two full-time members of staff to support it, but then I don't recall AD being particularly cheap in that respect either - although I imagine it would be easier to hire people for.

Group Policy Objects.

The mistake is assuming that 100% of services need to move in one go.

The two can, and probably should co-exist. If I could have an approved linux distro as my work device and access to appropriate VM's to run Windows apps where necessary this would be excellent.

With so many basic applications migrated to web based front ends the number of cases where you need a fat client for anything other than the browser itself is declining,

You should have stopped right there. StatCounter has no clue how to do statistics.

They count page views, not even unique visitors. They are only used on the smallest websites, not on any that has a more than few thousand visitors per year possibly.

They don't know what sampling bias is, and don't even try to compensate for it.

Because of these their numbers are not representative, and completely useless to determine install bases or changes in them. For all we know, Linux's market share amongst PC OSes could be 10% or 0.1%, because StatCounter's numbers and statistics are not actually measuring that, and any change in the latter might not correlate with the former.

In what way does this bias the results?

"For all we know, Linux's market share amongst PC OSes could be 10% or 0.1%"

So "we" don't know what way it biases them but "we" know it does.

It may not be biased in the political sense, but it's certainly not representative of the most popular websites. You could do a comparison of sites using the Chrome Lighthouse data to see how much overlap there is.

Akamai used to provide browser info and I suspect Cloudflare and other CDNs could do as well. I suspect any of these would be more representative of the most popular websites than statcounter.

How representative are the most popular websites of overall website usage? If the OP is saying that any website counter is not a counter of installed base that's fair enough. A measure of installed base would need to include stuff that doesn't go near any web sites.

OTOH we have a measure that's being taken as some sort of proxy for installed base and if that makes what appears to be a significant change month-on-month it needs more than a claim of unquantifiable bias to impugn that result. It may, of course, be that the overall numbers are that statcounter has are so small that their increase isn't statistically significant. Otherwise you'd need to understand the nature of the bias sufficiently well to show that a change there is what's underlying the apparent change in the overall share.

How representative are the most popular websites of overall website usage?

I think you've answered that yourself in what looks very much like a tautology! ;-) As I said, it's just another easily available dataset which could be used to assess any similar kind of report. Of course, it is itself biased as it relies on the Chrome browser so it will never pick up what the fanbois are doing.

The CDNs, which are generally mutually exclusive, have the advantage of not using third-party requests to collect the data.

I wonder if it might be dramatically undercounting page views due to the user blocking third-party traffic? If so, that would tend to have a bias of underreporting more technical systems (like Linux), as generally those who block third-party traffic are more technically capable and thus are more likely to run things other than Windows...

3.08% to 4.03% is a 31% increase, not 25%

I believe Linux Mint will be the distro that ISV's will eventually rally around. It's the most user-friendly distro so far and seems to work on the widest range of hardware.

It's still far from perfect, though. For example, a family member got errors on startup and it turned out that his boot partition was full. I needed to remove old kernels using "sudo apt-get autoremove". However, the boot partition was so full that it wouldn't boot properly. I had to resort to all sorts of voodoo command line stuff to reclaim enough disk space for it to work.

Would that be 1) boot off USB stick running a live iso 2) chroot into mint install 3) run apt-get autoremove?

Or am I barking up the wrong tree totally. I agree too much for ordinary computer as a thing to be used people.

And that's why I always carry a bootable USB around with me on my keyring. It has allowed me to fix many a computer from forgotton passwords, viruses, and dodgy downloads. Fixing a full boot partition would be trivial, and wouldn't need much in the way of voodoo.

I'm going to have to disagree.

I reckon it'll be steamOS or whatever it is that Valves supports. Why do I think that? I think that gaming is a hook. Kids will own Steamdecks to play games, and then they'll get used to the idea that they can sort of use this thing as a PC too. Then as they get older they'll need an actual PC for work, but now - and here's the kicker - they're already comfortable with the idea of steamOS, and of course they still want to play games too, so why not stick with what they know?

It's the same way that the 8 bit micros completely dominated the 80s. Gaming drove adoption. Yeah, they got killed off in business by the IBM PC, but they didn't die in the home until the PC was also capable of playing games so it could supplant them and do both. Games is a really powerful driving force.

Any Linux distro can run games. I've got Steam installed on my Linux Mint desktop and can purchase games if I want to (haven't done so yet).

Most people need a desktop to surf the web, read email, access their banking account and print a document every once in a while. Linux Mint suffices for that and is relatively easy to use (but the "autoremove" of kernels and installing of updates is still too technical in some cases).

Sure, any distro can but steamOS is a product . It's a thing people can just buy and use without thinking about it. It changes the perception, and the perception of Linux has been more important than the reality for a long time. Linux has been "good enough" for a long time, but the perception doesn't match that. I personally like mint. It was my daily for a couple of years before I decided that stock Ubuntu was now good enough that I was happy to go back to that - but people really like a thing they can buy and don't have to think about. The major benefit is that it comes on the device and once it's gotten it's foot in the door that way...

"The major benefit is that it comes on the device"

On the device? That's a hand-held gaming console. Somebody looking for a laptop or desktop won't see that as a benefit.

Yes, I know it can be downloaded and installed like any other distro but to those whith no interest in gaming its add-ons are going to be regarded as bloat.

Mint or Zorin are probably the best options for Windows refugees at present. I've said before, there really should be an opening for a distro designed to install on a Windows PC by shuffling things around to make space and then use some combination of Wine, virtualisation and or mounting the user's directory on the C: drive as the home directory to use the user's old files and such applications as can't be easily replaced with FOSS alternatives.

"there really should be an opening for a distro designed to install on a Windows PC by shuffling things around to make space and then use some combination of Wine, virtualisation and or mounting the user's directory on the C: drive as the home directory to use the user's old files and such applications as can't be easily replaced with FOSS alternatives."

Like that's going to be 'simple' for a home user with basic IT skills! Wine for starters is temperamental and often needs a fair bit of fiddling to get it to run things (and some things it just won't run at all).

I'm using Linux Mint on two desktops and a laptop now (successor to Xubuntu, successor to Lubuntu, successor to Ubuntu with which I replaced OS/2 in 2006).

Linux Mint is shit. Sound is a gamble. The two identical desktops are attached to identical printers; one can only print using wifi and one can only print over USB. One will tile windows left and right, one won't. And so on.

However ... Windows is even shitter and Linux Mint doesn't use snaps, which is why I put up with it for now.

I too think it's far from perfect, but still a whole lot more palatable than Windows. There's so much cruft running on it and Microsoft really doesn't care much about maintaining it properly. Often, junior developers seem to be in charge of updating it, continuously breaking things after updates have been rolled out.

The senior developers have all been moved to Azure and now, AI. Interns are now mucking around in the Windows kernel.

Microsoft seems to believe Windows will survive merely on inertia. I predict they'll be in a for a shock.

"We suspect that, sooner or later, someone will hit a magic combination of some near-bulletproof immutable OS and transactional packaging system that makes Linux conclusively easier than any Microsoft offering, even for your grandparents."

I can't remember when the last of my grandparents. !960s, probably. Will a retired hair-dresser cousin-in-law aged about 90 do instead? Zorin with plain old-fashioned dpkg-based updates works perfectly well. All this transactional-stuff sounds over complicated for something that Just Works.

Although a couple of weeks ago, after she had problems with an ATM and the bank's help line (what sort of bank's help-line tells a 90-year-old to clear her cache?*) I went over to take a look. I think she simply got confused about entering 2FA data but as Firefox was on v113 I thought I'd update it just in case.

Hmmm. Zorin's software management system has 3 entries for Firefox. It has Snap and Flatpak as well as the normal repository. All this helpful stuff just confuses things. Just run apt update and apt upgrade occasionally.

KISS

* Answer: a Spanish-owned one.

and nearly ONLY the UI which prevents good sales. That includes way to many annoying popups, which makes using an unadjusted Windows 11 [1]like this scene.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4CizzE-zZo

UIs are important, but TBH I think that Gnome has been a "good enough" desktop for quite a while now. Certainly for the last 4 years. Even my eighty-something year old parents are just fine with it. In fact they like it better than Windows because it has fewer buttons. They just pin the four or five apps they ever use to the Ubuntu taskbar and get on with their lives and it isn't constantly asking them to sign into things or do updates. Those I set to happen automatically in the background and they never thought about them again.

Here's why I think they wouldn't have bought machines with Ubuntu on if I'd not bought them for them:

They had no idea that such a thing existed.

And that is probably the biggest blocker to people taking up Linux as a desktop these days. Most people have either no clue there is such a thing, or if they do know about it, they think that's some nerd thing for nerdy nerds that they can't imagine themselves wanting because they're normal people who don't cast magic spells that look like this ${array[${#array[@]}-1]^^} .

Even for me - who is very aware that Linux exists and would very much like to be able to buy computers with it pre-installed - it's remarkably hard to do so. Most vendors will sell you Windows or Windows, and if you try and convince them to sell you a machine with no OS at all, because you don't want Windows, they just plain won't.

Some of them just plain will: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/

Although you then have to spec it yourself which, again, isn't going to help most prospective customers.

Indeed. I'm typing this from a Dell XPS15 running Ubuntu 22.04. It's without a doubt the best machine I've ever had, but it was issued by the company I work for and it arrived in the office with Windows 10 on it, and we had to re-build it. Dell actually do offer Linux on the XPS13, but go to [1]this page and look at the "operating systems" list on the left, it's not there. You have to select the machine with Windows and then customise it to chose Linux. What's more they only let you do that on one specific machine! Despite the fact that Ubuntu works perfectly on the XPS15, they won't sell it to you.

[1] https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-2-in-1-pcs/sr/laptops/xps-laptops?~ck=bt

> that look like this ${array[${#array[@]}-1]^^}

Which magic spell do you use to get monospaced-coding-style front on el-reg?

For the rest of your comment: Indeed, the "surfing, email, browser-games, look at pictures and videos from phone" works with every OS, this is were linux works great as desktop.

But Windows does have it's magic spells too. And I am not talking about powershell, which is readable and better than bash, I talk about .CMD perversions which make bash look like "object oriented programming".

I was informed (in a way that I think was intended as an insult, but never mind) that for those of us with enough comment history to prove we're not bots that El Reg supports a small set of HTML tags. In this instance the one you want is [1]code .

And yes, there's plenty of weird arcane shit in Windows, but Linux has a reputation for this stuff. Probably not really deserved at this point, but it's definitely there - especially amongst people who perhaps flirted with the thing a bit back in the early 2000s and were traumatized by being expected to occasionally do things in bash and swore "never again".

I personally love it, but bash is very much a product of a different era and to the average person it looks like fucking voodoo.

[1] https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_code.asp

"and nearly ONLY the UI which prevents good sales."

Nothing to do with the cost of replacing perfectly serviceable H/W every time Microsoft says "jump!"? And they've fixed the buggy updates?