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Bryan Lunduke at Network World calls out what other mainstream media have been too timid, or bought out, to call out. He starts by pointing out that choosing Microsoft Windows for your organization should get you fired and that if you haven't already replaced Windows, across the board, you absolutely stink at your job.
There. Finally the topic is broached in mainstream media and a proper discussion can now start among decision makers who can arrange complete migrations to GNU/Linux, Chrome/Linux, one of the BSDs, or a combination of them.
As Microsoft security problems continue to escalate since even the pre-networked, MS-DOS days, managers and front-line grunts will find themselves increasingly culpable for selecting unviable software, such as Microsoft Windows. If they wish to pay big bucks for maintenance, there are plenty of companies around to participate in the money. Canonical, Red Hat, M:Tier are just a sampling.
[Ed. Note: I debated whether or not to run this story — in some respects it's just the Windows vs *nix argument all over again. Also, there are proprietary programs which are critical for certain industries which currently only run on Windows. On the other hand, gaining a mention like this in the more mainstream media, does that mean we are approaching an inflection point? Witness the increased displeasure with Windows 10's telemetry and the difficulty in completely blocking it. What programs do you use that are only available on Windows? What keeps you from moving to another OS? --martyb]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @06:39PM
Drawing upon over 40 years of programming and systems administration experience spanning hundreds of different operating systems, I have concluded that it is not about programs so much as it is about protocols and formats.
Permit me to ramble:
As a FreeBSD enthusiast I have been waiting to abandon Windows for over a decade. What held me back was - others have also said this - Visio. But I can live without it, personally. I figure if my employer needs me to have it they will issue me an appropriately configured computer, and a license. Turns out they don't.
So I systematically inventoried my critical applications and realized that I was already relying heavily upon open source products - Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Chromium, Opera and Firefox, mostly.
LibreOffice includes a database front end that is probably more capable than MS Access and it even supports a local database, just like Access.
There's a LibreCAD, which I haven't used much yet - but as someone who has been using Visio since the 1990s, I can say that it's all about the libraries of cute icons, and that if a few thousand people spend a year or so using LibreCAD to draw floorplans, I assure you, there will be thousands of cute little icons.
A few years ago I had a bastardized FreeBSD laptop that allowed me to read PDFs using xpdf(1) - but I couldn't handle .docx files, until the latest release of LibreOffice, and so it was a crippled sort of freedom.
I used Ted(1) to maintain my resume in RTF format - a mostly-forgotten WYSIWYG standard from the 1980s that is still supported by Microsoft Word, so that recruiters could still (mostly) read my resume. There were occasional problems, though.
This was a critical threshold for me, because without the ability to read .docx and .pdf files, my ability to look for work was deprecated - I could now read PDFs, but when recruiters sent me .docx attachments I had to beg them to translate it into PDF or cut-and-paste it into the email ... and not all were willing to do so.
Now that LibreOffice works reliably, I am more or less free of Microsoft.
And so, to summarize:
1) Inventory your critical Windows applications (IE, Outlook, Visio, Word, etc)
2) Identify the protocols and formats they support (IE, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, JPG, PNG, PDF, DOCX, etc)
3) Search for open source equivalents
4) Test open source equivalents
5) Migrate data (and habits) from old to new application
Perhaps the only obstruction to doing this is the necessity of teaching users about file formats; but, dammit, they need to learn this shit! It's time to grow up and quit playing with childrens' toys.
Now, all that having been said, I am now studying 3D printing and CNC programming using some software called MasterCAM that is strongly and exclusively tied to Microsoft Windows, and which cannot be virtualized because it relies heavily upon an intimate relationship with a powerful GPU or two.
Oh, sure, there might be some ways to do it - see https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2z0evz/gpu_passthrough_or_how_to_play_any_game_at_near/ [reddit.com] - but right now, I need simplicity and reliability more than I need a bleeding-edge experimental setup, so I opted for a separate Windows computer, with eight cores and an adequate GPU, that's dedicated to high-end graphics.
And so dumping Windows is possible, but for certain legacy applications its just might not be cost-effective.
~childo