Sell Me on Linux

I posted this as a comment in another post but when I got done I realized it would probably just be better as its own post. I’m sure I could find the answers I need myself but frankly I trust the userbase here more than most online articles.

As my username hints at, I’m a lawyer. I’m considering starting my own firm as a solo practitioner. I need a computer and/or laptop for it, and as a new business my budget would be pretty tight. I’ve mostly only ever used windows, but I’m getting fed up with the bullshit, so I’m considering going with Linux.

I assume Linux is capable of doing everything I need, which is primarily handling word documents, viewing PDFs, watching evidence videos, and online research. But my concern is that some of the more commonly used video types might have trouble on Linux, or that some of the word document templates I use in Windows might have compatibility issues.

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

So I guess I’m asking a few questions. What is a reliable yet affordable option to get started? Are my concerns based in reality or is Linux going to be able to handle everything windows does without issues? What else might I need to know to use Linux comfortably from the get go? Is it going to take a lot of time and effort to get Linux running how I need it to?

For reference, I do consider myself to be somewhat tech-savvy. I don’t code or anything, but I’ve built my last two home computers myself and I’m not scared of general software management, I just don’t make it myself.

So, yeah, sell me on Linux, please.

lemann,

For opening Word documents, I’d highly recommend OnlyOffice. Has outstanding compatibility with documents originally created in Microsoft Word, and it’s free on Flathub

Another alternative if you have an existing 365 subscription would be the online version of Word in your web browser.

If you’re heavily into the 365 ecosystem though, do note that things like Onedrive compatibility aren’t all the way there on linux, so you’d miss luxuries like right-clicking a file and getting a shareable link, or sending a file to someone directly from the file manager. For these you’ll need to drag-n-drop the file into onedrive, or into your email app to send them.

Things like opening PDFs, viewing various video formats etc, are built-in and work flawlessly on pretty much all Linux distros. Support for opening encrypted PDF files should be flawless too, haven’t had issues with these myself.

Would recommend Linux Mint, or Zorin OS, as both have a pretty similar look and feel when coming from Windows

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

OnlyOffice. Has outstanding compatibility with documents

It might be decent, but is isn’t “outstanding”, advanced formatting and features sometimes fails. Another thing about OnlyOffice is that it is a web app, it might work fine for smaller documents, however when you’ve to load a 50+ page document scrolling around becomes really bad as you’ll have to scroll and wait 1-2 seconds for each page to load.

Things like opening PDFs, viewing various video formats etc, are built-in and work flawlessly on pretty much all Linux distros

It isn’t “flawlessly”. Forms in PDFs aren’t supported properly.

vettnerk, (edited )

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.

Sage_the_Lawyer,

Yes, mostly paperwork and email for sure. Some basic spreadsheet stuff for tracking clients and payments and whatnot, but there’s also programs for that.

One less common, yet essential, thing I haven’t gotten a specific response on yet, is converting word docs to PDFs with searchable text. Not sure if you know things about that, but it popped into my head while responding here so hopefully someone who sees this knows something.

And, a generic thank you to everyone who has responded, this has all been very helpful. Even if I don’t respond to you specifically, I appreciate it.

JustEnoughDucks,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

The one thing that I would look into is digital signing and change tracking

If you use that, I am not sure how it works between linux office programs and Microsoft office.

valkyrie,

I’m pretty sure you can print to PDF or save as a PDF in libreoffice.

FrostyPolicy,

LibreOffice has a builtin pdf export functionality.

drem, (edited )

you can export to pdf and the text is searchable (in firefox with ctrl f)

bismuthbob,
@bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz avatar

On my distro, hitting print in the Office365 web app autogenerates a searchable pdf. As mentioned by others, it is trivial to generate a searchable pdf from LibreOffice as well.

BitSound, (edited )

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.

Sage_the_Lawyer,

Yeah some counties use pointlessly complicated programs to distribute videos. I often have to try a few different players on windows to find one that works. If VLC has trouble with something, are there others you’d recommend as well?

lemann,

VLC can pretty much play everything - avi, avi+mjpeg, mov, mpeg, 3gp, flv, you name it. In some cases it can reconstruct corrupted videos and try to play them (typically AVI files)

There’s another player called MPV if you want a second option just in-case though!

redcalcium,

VLC usually can handle everything you throw at it. The other popular and capable media player is MPV, though it’s not as user friendly as VLC but has tons of advanced features.

BitSound, (edited )

VLC is the sort of software where if it can’t play it, I don’t know what else could. I guess I’d also try the ffmpeg command line tool to see if it can figure out what the video file even is, and maybe it could convert it to a regular format.

Also TBH such a video file would be interesting enough that you could probably post it here (if possible, or any metadata you can extract from it) and see if anyone knows how to play it.

bjoern_tantau,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

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.

BrianTheeBiscuiteer,

Agree. Linux isn’t that hard but there is a bit of a learning curve and you shouldn’t gamble your business on your ability to pick up a brand new OS. If you can afford support or an “IT Guy” then take the plunge. For general clerical stuff there should be zero compatibility issues.

interdimensionalmeme,

Use Linux and computer will devour your entire life just trying to make that thing you want, to work.

cyberwolfie,

I love Linux since switching nearly a year ago. Yet, I still once in a while find myself in situations where I screw up and I think to myself “Oh, I’m glad this is not my work computer”. If you have no experience with Linux from before, maybe you should consider getting a personal laptop, install Linux on that, and get comfortable using it before transitioning your business to it. That way, the first time you accidentally uninstall your desktop environment (I managed to do this not once, but twice…), it is not 10 minutes before an important client meeting.

indepndnt,

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.

Matombo,

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.

wesley, (edited )

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.

krash,

In addition to all the sound advice you’ve been give so far, you should have a support contract in case you run into problems and ideally, contract someone to set up your laptop so you have proper encryption, backup etc. You have to consider both meeting the business deadlines, and ensuring the confidentiality and availability of the data. If you want to do this yourself, contract someone to validate your configuration.

constate368, (edited )

It’s about being in the free software ecosystem, which is really a licensing issue.

Forcing people to contribute their modifications to software when they are editing free software ensures we’re never dependent on the decisions of one entity. This is what the GNU General Public License (GPL) is all about.

If we don’t like what someone did, we can take that part out and redistribute a better version that we can continue to modify. This might not matter to someone who doesn’t program, but it should.

You don’t have to be the one to get your hands dirty with code. Just being a user in the ecosystem opens you up to these benefits. Other people are going to take advantage of them, and you can just piggyback on their work.

I, personally, think it’s always just a matter of time before businesses make products worse by charging more/giving less. Look at Adobe. Look at Microsoft. Look at Apple. All of them want to lock people into endless subscriptions because they’re dependent on their ecosystem. What happens when Adobe decides they’re not charging enough for photoshop? They charge more, and everyone just has to deal with it. Same goes for Office. Same goes for Apple, they just do it the old-fashioned way by charging for the latest versions and making you buy new hardware.

nayminlwin,

It’s a rabbit hole, you have to get fairly deep into it to start reaping some “benefits”. Even if you start with something easy like cinnamon mint, there’s a small chance it might break something on major upgrade. But it’s generally fairly easy to fix if you have some grasp on the system.

The best way to learn would be to just install something like arch or debian in a VM but do everything in manual steps while trying to understand what every step’s accomplishing.

mindbleach,

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.

possiblylinux127,

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.

phx,

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.

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