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Comment by titanomachy | Hacker News Reader

Running such a setup would seem to require a professional level of competence in systems administration. Do you find it challenging to maintain that alongside your legal expertise?

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It is an investment in time and knowledge. But you know that your investment will not be wiped out because it doesn’t fit any more in Apple’s or Microsoft’s business plan. My workflow has become very stable since my switch to linux and opensource. Sure the software has quirks but you can always find workarounds. When I used Windows, I remember that I needed more clicks to do the same thing with every new version as Microsoft buried functionality in successive layers of UI. All in all I would say that I’m much more productive when working on a case, at the expense of spending some of my free time learning sysadmin, emacs, latex, etc. But it’s fun and I love it. You definitely need to have a level of interest in tech to go all linux in your firm.

Not a lawyer, but once you've acquired that knowledge, you have it forever. It's not like LaTeX changes very often (unlike, for example, Microsoft Word)

Microsoft Word is also quite stable, certainly in terms of functionality and especially backwards compatibility. They know how much money they make just from the immense inertia of being in the lead for 30+ years, and they don't kill off that golden goose.

Re-learning where a particular feature is hidden in the menus every few years has been an interesting experience.

Microsoft is even implementing (yet another) new UI right now:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/7/22565676/microsoft-new-off...

LaTeX is great for typesetting documents; easy to work with autonumbering, even nested and subnested lists. There's even a Koma-script package for legal documents (jura). But Word does a better job of redlining. And it is the standard, though there are a few offices that still use Wordperfect for the "Reveal Codes" feature. If your output is paper or a paper substitute like pdf, you can use any word processor. But if you need to collaborate, you need a 100% compatible Word processor. On Linux, it's Softmaker Gmbh's Textmaker. 100% compatible and a lot cheaper than Word. Odd that no one has mentioned it.

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