Linux

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

Absolutely STOP. Do not go with Linux, go with what you are comfortable with. If this is business, you do not have time to be uncomfortable and the learning curve to ramp up to ANY new OS and be productive is something that's just a non-negotiable kind of thing.

If you've never used Linux, play with Linux first on personal time. For business time, use what you know works first and foremost.

All OSes are tools. You do not just learn a tool when your job is waiting for a bed frame to be made or whatever.

TL;DR

If you are not comfortable with Linux, do NOT use it for business.

I use linux to run my law office, so it can be done. Most of what I use is web-based these days, so headaches are minor. That being typed, I've been using linux off and on since the 1990s, and there was a fair amount of learning involved. A few notes:

-Libreoffice is good enough for document drafting, unless you're extremely reliant on templates generated in Word. Even then, that's a few hours of clerical work that you can farm out with, presumably, no confidentiality issues to flag. Also bear in mind that if you end up using different Linux distributions on more than one computer, then you may run into minor formatting differences between different versions of your word processing software. Microsoft Office will be a reliable option unless you run windows as a virtual machine. There are workarounds, but they aren't business ready.

-Some aspects of PDF authoring can be tricky if you're doing discovery prep, redaction, and related tasks in-house. This is very workflow-specific, so if you're not a litigator or your jurisdiction doesn't have a lot of specific requirements for pdf submissions, it might not be something that you need to worry about. If it becomes a problem, then a Windows virtual machine might be a solution.

-Video support depends greatly on the linux distribution, so you may want to do a bit of research and avoid distributions like Fedora, where certain mainstream AV formats are not supported by default for philosophical/licensing reasons.

-Compatibility with co-counsel and clients will be hit or miss. I don't let anything leave my office that hasn't been converted to PDF and I only do collaboration when there is a special request to do so. I can fall back on a computer that I have which runs Office. It sounds like you have more than one computer, so you can have a backup plan.

-Hardware support is critical. If you need to videoconference and it turns out that your webcam doesn't have a linux driver, then you may be hosed. Research and test on the front-end so that you don't find yourself in an embarrassing situation of your own making.

-Learning curves cost money. If you're using an entirely new set of user software AND you're hopping between different distributions to find the version of linux that works for you, you'll waste a LOT of time that you could be using to generate billable work.

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.

Don’t do it.

First off, I love Linux. It’s my daily driver and I wouldn’t want to use anything else.

But in my past career I was the CIO at a very large firm. Lawyers need Microsoft Office and Windows. If you hire a good assistant or paralegal with word processing experience, they are going to need Microsoft Word. LibreOffice is good, but it’s not a replacement in this scenario. Good word processors are like wizards and will save you hours. It’s not worth it to make them learn something else.

Then there’s drafting software, templating, practice-specific tools, etc. Anything geared for legal is going to run on Windows. What are you using for time entry? What about accounting?

Not to mention, you have some information security obligations under the model rules and you don’t want to mess with that. Although Linux has security advantages over Windows, you still have to take measures to secure it. Maybe that’s easy enough for you to do on your own laptop, but your practice will grow to at least a few staff and an associate. Somebody has to do IT because you’re sure as hell not going to waste billable hours on it.

I had to use Windows in that old gig and it really wasn’t bad. It’s stable, reliable, easy to support. Everyone you hire will have used it before. It’s an unpopular opinion around here, but it’s a quality operating system that’s affordable. I guarantee your cost of ownership will be lower on Windows in your particular situation.

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.

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.

A lot of people lately have whined that Linux people are zealoted evangelists. You sure wouldn't know that in this thread... Most popular jist of responses is "make sure its the right tool for the job first"

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.

Use whatever software your peers are using, the way they are using them. The importance of software compatibility cannot be overstated.

I have exactly zero experience in what work a law office does, but I would think it's mostly paperwork and email? If so you can do that at no startup costs.

Pick a distro (pop, mint, whatever), and install libreoffice or one of its many variants for offfice integration.

A common misconception is that linux involves a lot of coding. Sure, it can if you want to - all the hooks for programatical access are there, for example if you want to build shell scripts for automation. But you don't need to. It's just an option many linux users, myself included, like to take advantage of.

When it comes to convincing you, all I can say is this: It costs you nothing to try.

The fact that there's entire communities full of people who will spend energy trying to convince you to give it a try, rather than a corporation with a marketing budget and lobbying power :)

My general advice would be: look at the apps you use (or would need to use) on Windows. If you're generally dealing with word documents, PDF's, webpages, and videos that are viewable on VLC.

See if LibreOffice/OpenOffice/OnlyOffice on Windows work as expected for the documents. If not, see if M365 through the browser does (your can run Edge on Linux and accessing the MS ecosystems seem to be the primary reason many do so.

If you can't do those things, Linux may not be for you, or at least may not meet the needs for your work.

For personal use, I'm all with users taking the plunge, seeing if Linux works for them, and/or some the adjustments they need to make. For many, it's a matter of a different UI for the same applications/tasks, but less invasive while being more customizable. In many cases I dual-booting or a VM, in case that user runs into a special case holding them to Windows (maybe a particular game). You could also dual-boot and flip to Windows if the edge cases it's needed are few and far between, but you'd still need to make sure to keep both OS's updated.

For a business user who may face time crunches, the last thing I'd want is for somebody to find out that the proprietary file format they're provided in the regular course of business only works on a proprietary software that only runs on Windows.

At the very least, grab a cheap windows license (got can purchase legit pro license codes online for cheap and then download the image for a USB installer from MS), run Linux as your primary and keep a Windows install in a VM (i.e. using KVM/libvirtd) for a bit in case edge cases emerge. For those that just need business apps (i.e. not games, graphics-intensive design tools or social hardware) that'll bridge the gap just fine.

Another option would be to try something like Windows with Ubuntu installed via WSL (subsystem for Linux) and i.e. MobaXterm to access the various Linux graphical apps. However that pretty much gives you access to Linux tools without the OS UI, and all the headaches of running with an MS operating system as the primary.

For my own job, I could go 90%-95% of what I need purely in Linux, with the 5-10% left being stuff like editing Visio documents, screen-sharing with sound or only for a specific app (in our workplace's conference app). Assuming you only need to join Teams/Zoom/etc conferences with audio and video, that part works fine from browser in either OS.

In short... it's a business, so I can't recommend just diving in, but it's for the same reasons I wouldn't recommend a business just switch their vehicle fleet to 100% EV's or move their office to a different city/state/country without a well thought-out transition plan, preferably built in stages. It may work out great and overall be a better experience nearly all the time, but if it prevents work at a crucial moment without a backup plan that can still be a deal breaker.

It's not windows.

Any bonus points for a concise answer?

I’m getting fed up with the bullshit

Frankly, that's the reason -- the original reason, and the most important -- to use Free Software. With very few exceptions, the origin story of every Free Software project was somebody getting fed up with a piece of proprietary software either abusing them or just not doing what they wanted it to do. In fact, the entire Free Software movement itself was invented in the first place because Richard Stallman got fed up with Xerox's bullshit back in the day!

So yeah, there you go: that's the only reason you need, and you already knew it.

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

The cost to try it is time. Take a laptop you can afford to wipe, install Linux Mint Cinnamon, and just see how you like it.

But in your specific use-case, I do not expect this is a good idea. You are not going to save money on any scale that matters to a law firm. You can run LibreOffice on Windows just fine, and if it doesn't work out, you can rent Office 365 (Dollars A Year). You're not in a profession where FOSS tools like Blender and GIMP might displace obscenely-expensive industry standards.

What free-as-in-speech software might mean to you is control. Windows 10 does some dumb shit. Windows 11 is even worse and getting worse... er. Even more worse? Even dumber. Linux distros and open-source programs are made by the kind of ultranerds who said "absolutely not" and are limited to problems entirely of our own creation.

Since Word documents are one of your bigger concerns, you can download LibreOffice on one of your current machines and try them out. That's the same program you'd be using on Linux.

It'd have to be a pretty unusual video format to have issues. Similar to above, you can try VLC on Windows and see if there's any issues.

Based on your description, I'd be surprised if you encountered any major issues. I'd recommend trying either Pop! OS if you're OK with a slightly different UI from Windows, or Mint if you want something more comfortable. Note that you can create a LiveUSB stick of either of those, or any other distro. You can then boot your computer from it and take it for a spin to see if there's any obvious issues.

This post reads like it was written like a lawyer.

Anyway what personally would do it get one Linux device and one windows device. You can then use both but you will have a backup.

If you're using your computer for work and can't afford to spend some time figuring out how to do something that would be second nature for you on Windows, you shouldn't switch. It would probably be more expensive than just buying a Windows license.

That said, you shouldn't expect too many problems. You can try out your Word templates right now in Libre Office. Or just run the web version of Microsoft Office in Linux. Video codecs are usually just one command away.

In terms of what distribution to choose, I would choose something popular that's stable and comes with sane defaults. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSUSE Leap.

The main difference for a newbie will probably be how to install software. On Linux you usually don't go to the manufacturers website and download an installer. Instead you go to your software center and search there for what you need. Similar to the App Store and Play Store on phones.

watching evidence videos

You might run into some trouble with surveillance videos that require some proprietary video player to play. Not sure how often you come across those.

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.

The task question is:

Is Online Office 365 good enough for you? Or, is an 'almost fully compatible' word processor enough?

The features are there, but it's a whole new interface to learn, and if you export to a word document, the document produced may look wonky when viewed in word. OTOH, whatever PDFs you produce, those will look right. And if Online Office 365 is enough, that's great, because you won't have to worry about that.

You'll need to establish a workflow, and others in your office will need to use (and get used to) the same workflow.

It's not a small leap for an office to take. I love Linux, but check out that it has what you need before you fully commit. Give it a try by dual-booting or by installing it on a secondary system.

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

Keep using what gets the job done. That's what computers are for. Do not switch to Linux.

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.

I've worked with lawyers a bit in an IT role so I'll put it bluntly. Don't bother.

Why? You have to ensure complete compatibility with Microsoft Office standards in your job and you may also need to access third-party systems especially document management systems on a regular basis. These things require Windows. It's a sad fact of life that your colleagues being able to read your documents and ensure consistent layout is more important than anything else.

Yes, you can try Libre Office and soforth. However, the moment the court staff, other lawyers or anybody else gets a jumbled mess you're going to cause yourself more problems than it's worth. Even you yourself need to be able to ensure compatibility when it comes to information storage and retrieval too.

Windows licences are essentially free with your devices anyway and the cost of Office is a couple of hundred bucks top. Money might be tight but losing information from your court cases could put you out of business.

Sorry Linux fanboys, but Windows is the superior option here as much as I wish it was not. It's simply the best tool for the job.

I think you should absolutely download a Linux distro or three along with VirtualBox and try it out. Look at a couple different desktops, play with cowsay, have a good time.

Don't switch to an unfamiliar operating system on a work machine without doing a lot of learning first.

Linux itself works in a very different way to Windows. The file system is fundamentally different, for one. You should learn how the Linux file system works, how it's structured, how users and permissions work, etc.

You would be amazed the little things I've seen people lose their shit over. Give a small example, I saw a guy blow all the way up because Linux doesn't use the word "shortcut." You know how in Windows, you can have an icon on your desktop with that little arrow next to it, and it might start a program, or it might open an individual file? In Linux, those concepts are called Launchers and Links respectively. There's a lot of little details like that. Keyboard shortcuts, what the middle mouse button does, all that kind of stuff is different as well, and that kind of thing even varies between distros.

You'll have to learn how to administer the system, how to keep up with updates, how to take and restore backups for your files and for the system. How to secure the system.

The bigger thing is going to be the software library. The phrase "word documents" stands out to me. There are several different productivity suites and word processors available for Linux, none of them are perfectly compatible with MS Word. In college I found that LibreOffice was perfectly adequate for projects I was doing myself. MLA formatted essay? No problem at all. Group project where you have to work together on a powerpoint presentation? Functionally impossible. I've given plenty of talks using LibreOffice Impress for visual aids, it works fine, but it interoperates with MS PowerPoint about as well as my cat does. If you're expected to communicate documents to other lawyers, the government etc. in .docx format...Linux may not be the best choice at least yet.

Your Word templates and such would likely have to be converted or redone. You don't need to install a Linux machine to find that out; you can install LibreOffice on a Windows machine and try it out.

PDF support is a bit better with the exception of forms. I forget exactly why, which organization was being a little pissy diaper bitch about putting closed source components in an open standard, was it Adobe themselves or the USPS of all people (why do I remember they're involved?), but PDF forms aren't well supported in PDF readers and writers available for Linux, and Adobe doesn't publish Acrobat for Linux. Typing up a word processing document and saving it as a PDF, opening a PDF and looking at it? Those work perfectly fine.

Viewing videos and that sort of thing, I've never run into a problem with that sort of thing on Linux, VLC is present and accounted for, and codecs aren't the nightmare they were back in the heyday of Windows Media Player.

Affordable we got. Linux and practically the entire software ecosystem are available for free, and Linux will run very well on computers that Windows doesn't. I've got a Dell here from 2012, it's got an Intel Core i7 with three digits in the part number, it doesn't run Win11 and feels like shit running Win10, feels brand new running Linux Mint. You don't need to buy a brand new top of the line machine to get a decent experience out of a typical Linux distro.

You expressed some concerns about not being a programmer. You don't need to be a programmer to use Linux, at least not this decade. It probably helped in the 90's. I will say though, one of the biggest advantages of Linux is how close at hand scripting tools like Bash and Python are. For example, I have a script that converts .docx files to .pdf files without launching any applications, and it appears in the right click menu when I right click a .docx file so it's convenient to run. It's like a two line bash script with a 7 line config file that's mostly stuff like what text and icon to put in the right click menu. This doesn't require a degree in computer science. On any platform, you might want to look at an autokeyer, which can save you a surprising amount of time.

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.

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.

don't go all in on linux when you're already trying to get a new business up and running. it's stressful enough without relearning an entire new os.

just install linux through virtualbox on top of windows or use a bootable usb/dvd to test drive it before you take the plunge and go all in.

if you really want to, you can install MATE on an amazon linux ec2 instance or get familiar with the command line on a micro sized free tier version.

or, for a more entry friendly approach, just enable wsl2 in windows 11 and get familiar with both gui programs and the command line. it's not perfect but it will give you a better understanding of the underlyings of linux without having to give up the programs you're ready for. when you're comfortable, you can go further.

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