Nah. The growth of Linux will barely make a dent on Windows user base. Windows is still huge in enterprise settings.
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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I wonder what must happen to roll out more Linux in the public sector. There is still software required by scientist of various professions that need a tool only available for Windows. Installing a VM is not an option; too complicated for the average user.
And there is Windows software not compatible with Windows 11. Here is a small chance to use wine, but will the setup be practical and installable by the users themselves? I doubt it and it will put more work on the admins.
I hope at least, that Linux maintenance will be smoother despite the need for compatibility for older Windows software in the future.
Digital sovereignty. Even Europe is looking at replacing Windows now. I know that attempts have been made before, but there are stronger pressures now and there are better alternatives for Windows-only workflows.
Most new apps are web based nowadays. Many companies are even ditching the desktop Office apps now (which is insane for its own reasons, but still). Engineers under 40 prefer Python over Excel. Word is good for WYSIWYG printing, but with a small government program it should be possible to make that irrelevant quickly and ditch PDFs along with it.
I'm hopeful.
I otherwise agree, but what’s particularly wrong with PDFs? Almost anything can generate a PDF these days.
My biggest issue with PDF it's hard to read on screens. On top of that PDF forms are notoriously buggy, tables are almost impossible to machine-read without specialized software, and even copy-pasting can be a hassle.
I get that print will continue to be a thing to some extent, but I don't think that business or government documents need to be typeset with static pages. I think it's time we move on to a much simpler standard that is made for free-flowing text.
PDF has also been problematic as a standard format, since it referred to proprietary features up until 2023.
PDF forms are often horrible when done wrong; however, PDF files are really good for when you really need a document to look the same everywhere and don't want to worry about what fonts the recipient has.
The accessibility issues are legit, though.
It’s a massive initiative. Entire staff must be retraining. IT infrastructure has to be replaced.
Worst of all, it will face a lot of resistance from stubborn people with a ”if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality. The public sector has a tendency to be quite slow moving.
..except that MS keeps fixing what’s not broke by adding AI to it, which is part of why people are ditching it.
I would suggest that the vast, vast majority of companies that use Windows do so for two reasons
1: Because the software is (mostly) interchangeable with what their customers use. Office docs can be opened in any Office application without any formatting errors. Generally speaking. Open an .odt in Word and it could (will probably) end up buggering up the formatting.
2: Because most business owners don't want to go to the expense of hiring a dedicated IT guy to manage a bunch of computers that their staff don't know how to operate.
Don't send people docx files
Send PDFs as they tend to be more secure since they can be opened in a web browser.
Because most business owners don't want to go to the expense of hiring a dedicated IT guy to manage a bunch of computers that their staff don't know how to operate.
Most businesses already have a "dedicated IT guy to manage a bunch of computers that their staff don't know how to operate."
And the computers are Windows!
People have been using windows for 40 years and most still are not good at it.
That will never change.
Do they really though?
The company I work for has 150 employees. Granted, most of those are across various departments in the worlshop, so don't use computers as part of their core work, but we have around 50 PCs around the site.
We don't have a dedicated IT person. We should, but we don't (currently), because our boss is the kind of old skool employer who doesn't really understand why we need that many computers when they didn't have them back in the '70S. I would suggest that there are far more mid sized businesses like that where the boomer owner holds a similar view than you might think. Or I'm wrong and just looking at it through my particular lens. But having worked for a bunch of mid sized engineering firms over the years, little about my current employer strikes me as particularly different from the others.
Regarding 2: That is actually part of my job. 95% Windows, the rest is MacOS and maybe 3 to 5 Linux users (myself excluded).
In the public sector in a few fields Linux just isn't an option at all, full stop, because of key pieces of software that are industry standards/straight up required for that field. CAD programs for example just makes linux a no go. Any fields that are dependant on Adobe products is another one.
I mean there are some work arounds. Winboat is promising. I've tried it with a few things but it's still buggy here and there i.e. sometimes it insists on launching the full VM for whatever reason. Bottles is just...I don't know it's not there yet and can be frustrating. Honestly I've had more success running non-gaming windows applications through Steam than anything else.
Plus as others have said the public sector can be...very slow when switching to new things. Look at how long companies held on to XP and Vista to the point they had to be forced to upgrade while kicking and screaming. Hell I buddy of mine is an IT consultant, runs his own business, and he's had new clients that were STILL on Vista and it took A LOT of convincing and work just to upgrade them to something slightly more modern.
Rookies. Not that long ago (less than 5 years) I saw an article about a business run with a Commodore 64.
You do realize that Windows 7 is ancient right?
The commodore 64 is like the single celled organism of tech
It could be worse: a PDP-11.
I wonder what must happen to roll out more Linux in the public sector.
Endpoint (device) management is mostly a solved a problem, the challenge lies in integrated systems that allow secured, controlled, and constant access to data in a way that is manageable at scale by hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of users.
That is where it gets wicked difficult and is what @Alaknar@sopuli.xyz is referencing. To my knowledge there is no real F/OSS equivalent to the tooling that MS Entra provides for IAM, DLP and MDM. You can maybe get close with a full deployment of NextCloud but that's really only replicating M365 functionality from 15 years ago.
Is it ultimately possible if you piece enough packages and systems together? Probably but it would be a massive plate of spaghetti that only a team of highly experienced *nix managers could hope to properly support.
You can definitely use a full F/OSS stack to replicate the functionality of a Windows Active Directory network but that's so last century. Today's organizations, no matter their type or size, demand more and they won't move to F/OSS unless they can get it.
I wouldn't call AD "last century." It is still deployed in many different places despite what Microsoft wants you to believe
I wonder what must happen to roll out more Linux in the public sector
Management tools. There's barely any IAM, DLP or MDM available for Linux, and whatever there is requires tremendous effort to manage compared to... just registering with Entra ID and Intune.
Not to mention zero touch deployments are not a thing.
An Outlook replacement. The new web Outlook is absolute garbage with zero addin api like the old one had
Make a replacement Outlook that connect to imap service or something that's close to feature matching (calendaring ect) and its game over for two huge revenue streams. it's a cornerstone of Enterprise 365 and they refuse to listen to clients.
Everything else is "good enough" in FOSS but nothing gets close to Outlook functionally.
Thunderbird is way better than Outlook
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Microsoft would kill to have linux's install base
Year of the Linux desktop 🤣👌
These articles always remind me of 80s Hulk Hogan with him taking about how big Hulamania is getting.
BRUTHA, IF YOU WANT TO GET IN THE RING WITH THE HULKMEISTER, YOU NEED TO START GETTING ON MY LEVEL OF RACISM. I'M TALKING ABOUT FULL ON DISPLAY FOR EVERYONE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD TO KNOW YOU'RE A DRUNK SON OF A BITCH WHO HATES ANYTHING NOT WHITE BECAUSE YOU CAN'T COMPREHEND HOW ANYONE COULD BE BETTER THAN WHITE SUPREME LEADER HULK HOGAN.
ALSO DRINK A LOT AND SLEEP AROUND UNTIL WHEN YOU DIE THE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD COULD ABSOLUTELY GIVE A SHIT.
THAT'S WHAT HULKMANIA IS ALL ABOUT BRUTHA.
Hulamania is getting
I hate hulk hogan, I hate AI videos....
but now I'm feeling a strong desire to see hulk hogan talking tough about his insane hula hoop skills.
Yeah…
I think most non-PC-gamer consumers will just go to Android and iOS :(. It’s the simplest path.
Not sure about business. Sheer entrenchment aside, I’ve heard conflicting reports ranging from Windows management systems being so good they're utterly unparalleled, to Windows systems breaking so much IT is getting frustrated.
Both can be true at the same time, it's when new features get added that things become a problem. I had a perfectly well functioning plotter and photocopier using a TCP/IP ports, windows decided that all printers and the computer should now use IPP changed the drivers and everything, that was a fun afternoon
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