I became a regular Linux user in the late 1990s in a bit of nerdery that I picked during in high school while looking for something that might enhance my “geek cred.” At the time, I mostly just wanted to know enough about Linux to set me apart from the average teenage nerd, but it didn’t take long before my superficial quest for technical superiority was replaced with a genuine appreciation (if not borderline obsession) with the values of the open source software movement. In the years that have followed, as I entered the workforce and worked my way up the ladder of influence over technology decisions, I grew to be something of an incessant open source advocate within many of the organizations I have worked with and currently work with. If you’re reading this, you likely already understand that the internet and many of the resources available on the internet are built with and/or on top of open source technologies: the server operating systems, the web server software, the programming languages (and their compilers / interpreters), the databases, and most of everything else out there are that makes up the meat of what we consider to be “the internet” are largely based on open source software. To put it into perspective, while it’s kind of hard to quantify directly, Microsoft has (depending on who is counting) somewhere around a third of the overall web server market share. The rest of the significant competition are open source, mostly Linux-based operating systems.

Supercomputers? As of November 2014, the top ten in the world are all Linux based.

Smartphones / Tablets? More than half of them use Android, which is an open source product that is Linux based at its core. Before you get too worried that your iPhone is hurting the trend towards open source market domination, know that Apple’s iOS operating system is based on Darwin, which is another open source project.

So, knowing the above, and the growing popularity of Linux and other open source products, why is it that Windows is able to maintain such a stranglehold on the desktop market, having over 90 percent of the overall laptop / desktop market share?

My assumption at this point is that most people just have taken it as a given that they need Windows.

Back in the 1990s, through the 2000s, and now into the 2010s, the statement “this will be the year of linux on the desktop” has been a recurring joke that has been uttered at least once a year by cynical technologists across the globe. This fruitless mantra has proven to be a perfect communication of both frustration and hope for many open source advocates, as well as a warning to anybody who gets too blinded by ideology or idealism: Every year has been the “year of linux on the desktop” until it came time to make that happen.

To the industry’s credit, there have definitely been some successes along the way: Linspire got linux based desktops onto Walmart shelves as early as 2002. Their specific offering was eventually proven to be a flop, but they got it into an absolutely gigantic retailer. Dell will ship desktops and even laptops that come preloaded with Linux today (though nobody seems to take them up on this,) Red Hat has become something of a fairly mature company that has adapted well to their enterprise customers, and most nerds at least know what Ubuntu is, even if they’re not actually using it themselves. Open source products in general have seen incredible successes as well, perhaps best demonstrated when you look at the market for databases: Ten years ago, people were still laughing at the idea of using open source databases for mission critical applications. Today, open source projects are defining the bleeding edge of database technologies, and they are carrying the weight of the largest and most demanding database applications. Moving past databases and into trendy sounding concepts like “Big Data” and analytics, that whole industry is being dominated by open source products, and companies are proving that they can be very profitable and very successful while still staying true to open source philosophies (I’m looking at you, Hortonworks.)

Despite all of these successes though, the fact still remains that nine out of ten desktops in the world use Windows, and nobody is holding their breath waiting for Linux or similar open source solutions to start significantly eating away at Microsoft’s market share.

I’ve long wondered why this is, and I have had a few beliefs on the matter. My overall feeling has long been that people mostly see Windows as the only legitimate answer to their needs only because they are asking the wrong questions to get there. I spend a lot of time trying to get people to at least consider the possibility of desktop linux, and the reaction is pretty much always exactly the same: The user absolutely needs Microsoft Office in order to function. Or Acrobat. Or whatever. The entirety of the conversation quickly gets flipped around a question of “What will allow my company to continue doing things exactly the same way we always have.” Not surprisingly, the answer that everybody comes up with to this question is basically “Exactly what we have now.”

But, for the sake of argument, what if we were to instead ask “What is the best way to meet the needs of my organization?” This isn’t 1997 any more. Installing linux on a desktop isn’t the chore that it was when I was in high school. More importantly, there has been a massive paradigm shift in a lot of applications, moving functionality away from native software running on the OS towards web-based software running in the browser. Browser based online collaboration tools are very advanced now and are getting more mature by the day. I have personally not used Outlook since 2008, and I don’t miss it (or standalone mail clients in general) at all. Instead, I have a browser window open on my laptop at all times with a tab opened for each of my Google Apps mail accounts, and as a result use email exclusively through either the web browser and on my phone. There is nothing dependent on any operating system there, and it’s pretty nice since I get the exact same email environment if I put my laptop down and move to my wife’s desktop or to a shared computer in a hotel business center.

I work with a number of companies and I’ve brought shared spreadsheets to most of them. The companies I did not bring them to had them in use already when I showed up. It’s really hard to argue for the necessity of Excel when you’ve got Google Sheets, Spreadsheet, Apple’s cloud-based Numbers, and the other hundred thousand similar products out there.

“But Chris,” you’re thinking while rolling your eyes, “I am an Excel power user. I can’t be using some underpowered browser-based app.”

If you’re not familiar with the Apache project’s OpenOffice.org or its rapidly-growing cousin LibreOffice (both of which share a common history until very recently) you might be surprised to learn exactly how far open source desktop productivity software available for Linux-based operating systems has come. This isn’t some new competitor on the market that is fighting against decades of development and innovation from Microsoft. OpenOffice / LibreOffice have been in development for thirty years. They are very mature products, and they have been owned, at different times in their career, by companies such as Sun and Oracle. A company called IBM contributed a lot of the code base in recent years. This isn’t a fly-by-night garage-based development project, this is the a legitimate, usable product that needs to be taken seriouusly by more people. And honestly, despite my own bias towards open source products, I have to be a bit of a pragmatist considering I do have real work to do. I honestly prefer OpenOffice’s word processor to Microsoft Word. I prefer their program called “Draw” to Microsoft’s Visio, too, which is sad since I spent so much money on my Visio license.

For the record, I prefer Excel just a little bit over the OpenOffice spreadsheet program “Calc,” but if I was buying across an organization, I would prefer Calc.

The point I’m trying to make is that there are methods to get many (if not most) work functions done using open source software, and they’re really not the janky workarounds you might be expecting so much as they are just different ways to solve problems than what you have grown to be used to. If you’re willing to ask “how can I meet my goals” rather than “how can I use what I’m used to,” you might be surprised at what options the world has for you and what benefits some of those options might have. For example, if you really look at many large organizations where there are lots of people sitting in seats using computers, you might be interested to learn that there isn’t any real compelling reason to keep them all using Microsoft Office, and that is usually the software that makes most people hang on to Microsoft Windows with all of their might. I’m not here to claim that Microsoft’s offerings and the open source alternatives are 100% compatible with each other and that there is no loss of functionality between the two, but I am fairly confident that most compatibility issues can be reasonably addressed just through designing your business workflows to be somewhat more forgiving of differences in file types. Do all of your employees need to exchange document files with outside entities? Can they be shared via collaboration suites like Google Apps? Can you use legacy file types (which generally have great compatibility since they’ve been in development for so long?) Is there any reason your employees actually need Outlook?

(Also, for the record, the majority of “lack of compatibility” issues between say OpenOffice’s word processor and Microsoft Word are that sometimes the formatting doesn’t look the same in particularly complex documents. It’s not like “these files just don’t open.”)

When you start asking questions like these, you might just begin to learn a few things about your options.

In 2010, I stood up a data entry facility in Pittsburgh, PA. Over the previous couple years, I had helped build the data entry software that we use in this facility, though we had only ever deployed it in exclusively Windows-based desktop environments. When it came time to buy fifty computers for our data entry facility, though, I really started looking at our options. As a small business, buying fifty computers was a serious expense, and we thought we might be able to find ways to drive our costs down.. In architecting the data entry system, I had designed it specifically to be web based, primarily because we wanted to be able to support remote workers working off-site without worrying too much about their local configurations. While we eventually phased out the majority of off-site work performed on this system, the web-based architecture of this system, along with the fact that this system was the focus of the work performed by most of our employees, made this data entry facility (in my opinion) an excellent candidate to test out my beliefs on supporting desktop Linux in our company. It seems like it might have been a bit of a gamble, but we had the benefit of being able to test compatibility by virtue of the fact that testing anything in Linux is just as easy as downloading Oracle’s VirtualBox (free) and setting up a Linux based VM of your choice (also free) from the comfort of whatever Windows / OSX / Linux environment you’re comfortable with. We didn’t have to spend a single dollar on purchases to test anything, we just got it all for free off the internet (legally, no less) and tested it before making any decisions to move forward.

From there, we developed standard configuration stacks and images based on Ubuntu running Chrome and OpenOffice.org. (If I was being honest, I’d admit that we didn’t standardize our web browsers until much later, after we realized that there was some differences between functionality in Chrome and Firefox. Lesson learned!) Chrome’s PDF viewing capability came in handy and kept us away from Adobe Reader, which is something most IT nerds will tell you is a little slice of hell you want to keep out of your networks if at all possible.

It’s been nearly five years now since we rolled this out as our default computer configuration, and I have been waiting for it to fail or to present itself as inadequate ever since. However, since we started off with a question of “what can we do to make this work?” instead of “what can we do to make this work like everybody else does,” the necessity of Windows on every computer simply has not ever popped up. (For the record, about ten percent of our computers as a company are Windows-based for one reason or another, usually to make some software available to people who really do rely on certain tools.)

What have I learned?

Our software license costs as a company are basically nonexistent. We use Google Apps, Basecamp, and Quickbooks Online, and pay about $200/month total for all of them combined. We don’t pay for desktop software support (we have enough nerds to self-support), we don’t pay for software when we buy new computers, and we haven’t had to pay for upgrades. The four or five Windows machines we do have came with Windows 7. We’re skipping Windows 8. We might need to upgrade them someday, or they might be retired eventually. Ubuntu makes much better use of bargain computers than Windows does. Our data entry systems are effectively one or two rungs above what would be considered thin clients in terms of processing capability. We needed to temporarily expand a surge staff during one of our contracts, and so I bought a dozen or so used laptops for like $120 each. They absolutely crawled under Windows 7 but worked fairly decently under the most recent (at the time) release of Ubuntu. Sure, I probably won’t going to be solving chess any time soon with the hardware available to me in those laptops, but they work very well for the work that they were needed for. This has also allowed us to really scrape the bottom of the barrel on our new machines as well. I’m pretty sure we’re the only company to ever buy AMD Sempron based computers and actually get work done with them. I haven’t needed anti-virus software on any of these computers. I am very hesitant to say this too loudly, as I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I need to get more diligent about this, but these computers have been very low maintenance and have required little in the way of security or protection. The flip side to this, I will note, is that every Windows machine I have ever deployed to any user environment has inexplicably required constant attention from a usability perspective, almost as if a fresh install of Windows has a finite shelf life like fruits or vegetables. There just comes a point where everything slows to a crawl and is all gummed up and it makes more sense to just reimage it and start from scratch. The anti-virus programs available always seem to get to a point where they become just as much of a burden as the viruses themselves. This brings me to my next point: Nobody screws with the Linux machines in my office. For whatever reason, people love screwing with Windows machines. Windows users, without fail, will try changing settings or screwing with system files, or any other terrible idea that requires you to lock down the system to the point of asphyxiation. In my experience, in the hundreds of users I have put onto my office’s Linux based machines, nobody has really seriously broken anything, and we don’t even keep security too tight on the machine level. Maybe this is a result of lack of familiarity, and maybe that means that it’s only a matter of time before Linux users start poking at security like they do on Windows. I’m not sure, but for now I will claim it as a benefit. We have Linux machines in use that have not been changed in any way since we first deployed them in 2010. They’re running the same installation of Ubuntu they got the day they were put into use. They work just as well as they did on their first day. Given the above points, our IT support needs have been very light. We don’t have any dedicated IT staff in the data entry facility. We don’t contract it out to a vendor, either. Knowledgable operations staff basically handle problems as they arise internally, and such problems are really are few and far between. These computers have really proven to have a “set it and forget it” quality about them. Centralized enterprise desktop management, the one functionality that really used to make Windows the only real option, is becoming more and more mature for linux, and these offerings are quickly getting better and better with every year that goes by. Microsoft isn’t the obvious winner in all environments anymore, and the best choice is going to be defined by the actual needs of your company now. Most of the users in my office don’t ever do anything outside of the browser. This is my most important point that I have saved for last. While you might see that as comically impossible to achieve within your own organization, with the growing amount of functionality that is becoming browser based these days, I assume that many small businesses (if not mid-to-large businesses as well) are moving towards a point where having most users perform all of their job roles in the browser is not going to be uncommon or even considered to be unorthodox. Once that point hits in your company, how are you going to be able to continue justifying your enterprise software license costs?

Now, like I mentioned earlier, I am a bit of a pragmatist, and I’m not going to expect people who use professional software like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to make the leap to Linux together and hope that the open source equivalent works better. If Windows works best for your specific application, I’m not here to say that you shouldn’t use it. Truth be told, there are a lot of things that I think Microsoft does correctly, and I’m not about to pretend otherwise. What I’m saying, though, is that perhaps it really is an appropriate time to look at Linux and other open source products and see whether or not the benefits finally outweigh the risks. I have consulted for several companies that had five and six digit annual enterprise license costs, plus the costs of maintaining internal IT support, all of which could have been partially or fully reclaimed by migrating to open source alternatives. Maybe it’s time for your organization to really look at what you’re actually trying to achieve, and dive deeper into the processes that support your objectives to see whether they might be replaced by something cheaper and easier to support.

Maybe we can actually make this the year of Linux on the desktop?