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.
if you want to try other distros, try using gnome-boxes for a bit - it lets you easily spin up a virtual machine. there’s better vm apps out there but boxes is really simple to use. I played around with getting Arch installed via cli last night in a vm (via boxes) - didnt actually install it of course, just re-partitioned the /dev/vda, etc.
I was using mx linux for a while on my testbench machine, switched over to kde neon recently and it’s a much better experience.
Mozilla being Mozilla, I’d guess. They should have gone sel-hosted with sourcehut, or at least gitlab. Or if not self-hosted, the choice should have been at the least gitlab or better, given it allows to chose DCO over CLA. But perhaps not everyone cares… I remember when gitlab introduced DCO, and how that helped debian and gnome to migrate to gitlab. After allowing DCO, other projects migrated as well.
I’m not that fan of gitlab, and I’d prefer sourcehut for open source projects, but if wanting something closer to github, then gitlab might be the answer. But Mozilla is a corp, maybe they don’t care much about these things, and as a corp, perhaps they were looking for CLA sort of contribution any ways…
I’d also like to see an open platform for their source code, but Github is undeniably the preferred platform for most developers, so I understand Mozilla’s decision.
So long as only the source code is hosted on Github I don’t think it limits people to contribute. Bugs and features are still tracked with the existing tools.
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.
Whatever you know best. My personal choice of distro is Gentoo, my gaming pc and my carry laptop both run it. My games run great in gentoo, and because I understand it best, I deal with few issues. For a long time it was Arch, and before that Ubuntu. I used Ubuntu for only maybe 2 months before moving onto Arch then Gentoo. My games always worked, but once I really understood Linux, they ran great.
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