Brenda in accounting isn't going to run Ubuntu even with the cute animal names. Until that happens,there will be stacks upon stacks of windows optiplexes being sold every day.
Also nobody misses sloaris. I'm going to chalk that remark up to a misfired punchline.
I doubt Brenda would care much if she was running something like RHEL for work since it can run a browser as good as anything. I assume the main thing keeping Windows around in her case is all the IT endpoint management stuff built around the MS ecosystem. Personally, I'd probably be all in on Ubuntu or some derivative if not for gaming.
In my experience people balk when they realize they’re not using Windows or Office. I’ve literally had someone sit in front of a Linux computer with OpenOffice and work fine on it until they realized “hey the title bar says OpenOffice Calc - it’s not excel! I don’t know how to use this!” Despite the fact they were using it just fine. At this point no amount of convincing made them give it another try - they’d just cross arms until they were put back in front of their known, trusty Windows computer.
So I agree they don’t care but there’s also the “I’m not trained for this” fallacy.
>I’ve literally had someone sit in front of a Linux computer with OpenOffice and work fine on it until they realized “hey the title bar says OpenOffice Calc - it’s not excel! I don’t know how to use this!” Despite the fact they were using it just fine.
I guarantee that this won't happen with "brenda in accounting" (ie. typical excel jockey). The mismatching shortcuts/formulas/feature set will immediately tip them off. For someone who's viewing a few spreadsheet and/or doing some basic editing (ie. entering cell values), I can imagine it happening.
I was wondering how much native MS Office matters these days. I've been using OWA and Office 365 via browser for the better part of a decade on a Linux workstation because that's the compromise it took, but the experience was never good. I wonder if native would make much difference.
For basic usage the browser variants are good enough but Excel application is significantly more powerful. If you are an excel power user there is no non native alternative at the moment.
Really the experience supporting users across lots of organisations is at odds to that.
Coming from a place where changing the Windows background from the default XP theme resulted in people stating they literally weren't able to work and actually refusing to work for several days, having to hack up the Chrome deployment so the shortcut uses the IE icon and calls it "Internet Explorer", Brenda in accounting absolutely cares that she's on a Windows machine running Office unfortunately.
Also nobody misses sloaris. I'm going to chalk that remark up to a misfired punchline.