More and more of this software is moving to the cloud and only requires a web browser.
A distribution that is very difficult to break and can launch a web browser would already meet many use cases for receptionists, hotels, consultation stations, etc.
Also the limitations of fax sort of end up being it's differentiator to email and it's biggest advantage. Not needing an email server is a big boon, not really being susceptible to phishing is a boon, and with modern fax over internet it's virtually indistinguishable in user experience from email.
I remember fax phishing even before I had ever heard of email. From many large companies, simply paying a sub $100 invoice was standard procedure without even checking with the other internal bodies.
If only a standard existed to do this... Hint: it exists since ages in Italy and it has been extended to Europe recently (See Registered Electronic Mail - RFC 6109 and ETSI EN 319 532 – 4)
The United States is not the only country in the world. In France, it is almost impossible to make an appointment without using Doctolib, which is SaaS software for booking consultations (and lots of other things).
Doctolib is a B2B model. Patients are not the customers; medical practices are the customers. Doctolib saves on the cost of a medical secretary, which is why it is so popular.
What's more, this is a sensitive and regulated field, where trust is essential. They can't afford to mess around if they don't want to quickly find themselves subject to moe restrictive regulations.
They were heavily criticised in France because they allowed charlatans and people with no medical training to register (particularly for Botox injections).
As soon as this became known, they quickly rectified the situation.
Doctolib is not the problem at all. he real problem is the lack of government proactivity on these initiatives.
If the government had already thought about this in advanced (even in 2013 when doctolib was just starting out), then there could be very strong protectiosn for data which would then allay all of these concerns, and we might have had multiple players in this space.
The best use of Doctolib for me is that I can make appointments without having to speak perfect German on phone. I can make appointments in evening when I'm back from office and can relax a little bit. So, doctolib is a godsend for me as an immigrant here. and I'm guessing for a lot of people too. I can look up doctors who are available without having to bother the receptionist. This is much more efficient way of doing things.
> It will inevitable be enshitified.
that only happens with the western venture capitalist model in private companies. doctolib makers already have income from all these government contracts instead of just relying on adverts and hype
Not just in the US, they‘re surprisingly popular still here in Switzerland. I‘ve written interfaces to fax gateways (convert incoming fax to pdf, extract metadata, save in DB) multiple times.
Because Chrome OS is offered on low-cost laptops that are unsuitable for office work.
What's more, it's Google, so we're not safe from a ‘Lol, we're discontinuing support for Chrome OS. Good luck, Byeeee.’.
Some offices still have bad memories of Google Cloud Print, for example. I'm not saying that being an early adopter of a distribution that's less than a year old is a good solution. Just that Google's business products don't have a very good reputation.
> Because Chrome OS is offered on low-cost laptops that are unsuitable for office work.
ChromeOS Flex exists, it is free of charge, and it runs on more or less any x86-64 computer, including Intel Macs.
Nordic Choice got hit with ransomeware and rather than paying, just reformatted most of its client PCs with ChromeOS Flex and kept going with cloud services.
Being #2 with tens of millions of users is OK, you know. It doesn't mean you've failed.
Sure it's less popular. It came in under 20 years ago, competing against an entrenched superpower that was already nearly 30 years old back then. It's done pretty well.
The Google Apps for Business bundle has outsold by far ever single FOSS email/groupware stack in existence, and every other commercial rival as well.
Notes is all but dead. Groupwise is dead. OpenXChange is as good as dead. HP killed OpenMail.
My medical devices run Windows due to specialised software. But at my medical office PC I use Linux: EMR and receipts through a web app on browser (locally hosted but it can be cloud), LibreOffice, Weasis Dicom etc
And that supplier could decide to bundle their box with such a distro, if this can save them money either due to licencing or better stability (=less support).
It is possible for somebody to make this into a workable bundle targeting specific professions/environments. A doctor would not care if double clicking X icon open an app through wine or not.
Jira on-prem and cloud works just fine on Linux. My experience is support tickets usually go through there. And then calls and stuff are on zoom or maybe teams - both also work on Linux.
My non-software engineer friends have better things to do than learn Wine, and yet they use it everyday when playing games on their steam deck, unaware of its existence.
You don't need a medical degree to have logic and common sense takes on the observed use of PCs by doctors around which I spend a lot of time around.
That's why doctors in my country still prefer legacy physical pen and paperwork, versus interactions with the modern digitized equivalents which are universally hated because they're not designed by doctors but by some consultancy who won the government tender.
Adding dealing with an unfamiliar OS and Wine on top of that is not the slam dunk you think it is.