David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Jun 5

Almost 25 years ago, I wrote a blog post with the title ‘jumping ship slowly’ about leaving Windows (XP was awful, it was mind boggling to me that Vista managed to make people nostalgic for XP). My advice remains the same:

Don’t try switching OS first. The OS is the most easily replaceable bit in the stack. Switch applications first. Most ‘Linux’ apps are cross platform. They’ll run on Windows, and the few that don’t will run in WSL2. You can switch out apps one at a time, and take the time to get comfortable with the alternatives.

Once you’re comfortable not using any Windows-only apps, changing the OS but using all of the same applications is very easy to do. Changing OS and application stack at the same time is an enormous obstacle.

I believe this is also why a lot of corporate and government Linux migrations fail: they try to change everything at the same time and that’s too steep a learning curve.

Show threadlotv
@david_chisnall
Our workplace decided to free themselves from Microsoft licenses and rolled out openoffice across the board. Except they never updated it to assure interoperability with MS Office users. Then they made exceptions for folk who needed excel because of macros, then people who had to send a lot of docs to other places then people who complained because him at the next desk had "real" office. Eventually the whole initiative just fell apart.
Jun 5 at 10:40amWeb
Show threadlotvJun 5
on a personal level, I switched to linux on my laptop because it wouldn't upgrade to Windows 11. (Using it now. It's fine.)