Not sure if this is the right place for it, but would anyone be interested in assisting an MSP in helping refine our Linux Stack?
Our goal is to take companies that are currently using a Windows stack and move them over without too much retraining on the user’s part.
Our current stack is Linux Mint, LibreOffice, a custom RMM agent, and a few bits and bobs that differ per client, but that’s all malleable. We have a stack, I’m just interested in anything that may make it better. Of note, we donate to FOSS monthly for roughly the licensing fees of the non-FOSS alternative that the clients would be using.
EDIT: Further info for some incredibly hostile replies who are seeking to purposely get offended…
As an MSP, the monthly client fee remains the same regardless of if the clients are on Linux, MacOS, or Windows. I assure you, we’re not winning new converts with Linux and hoping to capture some untapped market. This isn’t a money-maker. We are avoiding e-waste and upcycling machines for free on our own dime. If the client doesn’t want to convert, we donate the systems when they are discarded to one of the nonprofits we support for free. Again, switching clients to Linux wouldn’t make us any money as we don’t bill for project fees. If anything it would make us less money because we’re not trying to sell new objects to the client and are signing ourselves up to train and deploy to them. There’s no sneaky evil hidden agenda here.
I was never looking for someone to design the entire implementation, just one or two comments saying something to the tune of “X distro / software is easier for newbies, take a look!” or something.
You should stick with more “corporate” or adjacent distros, that way they (or you) can purchase a support contract without having to reinstall or shift later down the line, so more like fedora or opensuse.
Postgress is more mainstream than SQL server in cloud native environments, no licensing. And plenty of managed option without too much of a lift and shift.
Next cloud might be an option to replace office 365, should look at open/only office (forget which one is active) along side libre office.
I think jitski can help replace zoom/teams, kind if.
Biggest hurdle will be excel and Active Directory Nothing else comes close to as feature (and hair pulling bug) filled as excel.
For AD there’s not even really an equivalent, but that can be a good thing. I would look into combining an Oauth service (keycloak is suppose to be good for “consumer” grade, Okta or whatever preferred cloud provide has for more professional) along with something like a casbin library (at least for servers/development).
I highly recommend following all the self hosted and open source communities here on Lemmy, I find new tech at least once a week from them that I consider taking to my bosses.
Oh and pangolin for a VPN tunneling replacement.
Proxmox communities are also good for some ideas, basically every sysadmin I know eventually spins up a cluster and builds their ideal tech stack that they wished they could use at work.