I eventually migrated all my e-mail to gmail, because I don't feel any satisfaction or value out of "beating the system" to make my personal domain work as an e-mail address.
MangoCats
joined 5 months ago
Define smaller.
I gave up running mail through my own domain hosted by a "smaller" provider (Canadian hosting company with less than 1M clients) because I was constantly having delivery issues because somebody somewhere on an adjacent subnet got blacklisted for SPAM, or worse.
I agree with your assessment of e-mail... you either rent under a big provider or you spend countless hours playing whack-a-mole with whitelist-blacklist keepers. The big providers do this too, but they're so big it's not a major slice of their operation.
a crazy amount of money on license fees
License fees pay for development, sales, support, and profit. When you go open source you can skip the sales and profit, but you have to pick up a bit of development and ALL the support, which is considerable during times of big changes, like migration to a new desktop.
The German IT fish keep coming back for the bait - never bothering to avoid the hook.
enforcing 2FA for all accounts at our company directly caused at least 2 people to quit at my company.
Thereby measurably improving the workforce.
I just moved the things that sit on the ceiling and nobody notices!
Somebody noticed.
Cross platform app development has been a viable and very available choice for 20+ years now.
Organizations which are developing their specialty applications locked in to a specific OS.... get what they deserve.
The names have changed. I literally had that conversation with "an engineer" 20 years ago wherein he concluded "I don't know, if I have to learn new names for most of the programs I use (Word, Photoshop, maybe two others) I don't think I want to use that other OS." I had to support his position, if you can't retrain to click on "Libre Office Writer" instead of "Office Word", then a move to Linux isn't for you.
the IT support will go through hell.
I thought IT support was already in perpetual hell?
For the last 10+ years "the desktop" has been over 90% the browser, and the Chrome, Firefox, Edge user experiences are pretty similar to start with. Chrome on Linux vs Chrome on Windows is virtually indistinguishable.
I gave my wife a Dell laptop new from the factory with Ubuntu on it about 3 years ago. The printer support in Windows was already bad, and yes it's a bit worse in Linux, otherwise she just complains less and has fewer screaming fits of frustration.
Just remember, the license fees mostly don't go into development, or maintenance, or security, or any of that, they mostly pay for "sales" which includes a strong component of end customer support. When you divert "all that money" into FOSS, FOSS development and maintenance might be lucky to get 20%, the other 80% will be spend training and employing tech support.
At that scale it starts to be about the cost of support, and if M$ will hold their hands for the installation, configuration and maintenance, at some point that costs the state more to provide for Linux than the M$ licenses... Of course, when they lean so heavily on M$ for keeping their systems running, the temptation for abuse becomes strong...
If I were "head of state" I would insist on development of homegrown talent to at least maintain the systems, hopefully configure and even build them too, not as a matter of money, but as a matter of security, independence, etc. I would try to pull back before reaching the point of developing locally used systems that aren't used elsewhere, that's not good long term, but if you develop the local talent to run the things, and they naturally build some of their own things, encourage that to be shared with the larger world in addition to leveraging the best shared (locally vetted, secure) tools from elsewhere.
I think it's simple pragmatism. It will cost them, money and lost productivity, retraining all their computer users.
Regardless of the technical aspects, just the bitching and moaning of the workforce alone is enough to push the decision makers to take their chances with enforcers of the procurement laws instead.