Hacker News Reader

Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

Lots of enterprises out there with many users who need nothing more than a web browser, email, light word processing and maybe slideshow software. Active Directory integration makes the migration possible. Chrome OS provides it all in a way which dramatically reduces maintenance costs compared to Windows.

If Google starts showing some reduced TCO figures, they'll start to pull a lot of converts.

View on HN

Be careful, there is the idea that the IT guy has of what the other employees "just need" and what they actually do. Unless you are talking about a really low level employee who is only authorised to use company hardware to press certain buttons on certain forms, it's likely that most employees deal with much more complicated workflows than their IT department realises.

Can't believe I'm writing a post to support MSFT of all people, but really, you can get a pretty low maintenance windows install these days - see the ASUS 'winbooks' & note that msft offers cloud based AD & office..

So have enterprise Linux distros, for at least a decade now. People still use Windows.

Because Linux still isn't ready to roll out for the average enterprise office user. My mother, father, wife, and sister all have higher ed degrees and fruitful careers and can't realistically use a linux machine - even today. Linux' open nature has been it's greatest achievement, and it's worst enemy. Lack of commonality or agreement on package sources, etc., has led to an ecosystem that's all but inaccessible to the Real World.

I love it myself, but until you can walk into a Best Buy and a quarter of the options are Linux machines that the sales people can show off as well as the mac airs and surfaces, it's going to stay for people like me.

And that's just the home world. Trying to bring business into it? Unless your staff is purely development oriented, you now have to retrain every one of them (and probably most of the developers). Linux for wide spread average business user use is a non starter.

I work in Tech and can work well with Linux shell but still use Windows as my main OS. I've tried various Desktop environments, none was as nice and productive as working with Windows for me. I still try it every year but so far I've always gone back after not more than a week.

And Excel remains very powerful for quick data analysis, quicker than python tools for most one-time work.

I think that Linux will become more successful where people don't interact closely with the OS (Phones, Kiosks, simple terminals) but Windows will remain dominant on most computers.

"Because Linux still isn't ready to roll out for the average enterprise office user. "

And my point is, how will Chrome OS enterprise be different?

Do you think they'll write their own Printer management tools, or just install CUPS?

Will they write their own Active directory client, or just use SSSD or Samba or whatever RedHat is using these days?

From my experience most people use Excel to some degree. Google Sheets is ok but tends to be slower to work with than Excel and cannot handle larger amounts of data.

Not sure if the migration effort and lost productivity is worth the cost savings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com