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Sage the Lawyer @lemmy.world

Sell Me on Linux

I posted this as a comment in another post but when I got done I realized it would probably just be better as its own post. I'm sure I could find the answers I need myself but frankly I trust the userbase here more than most online articles.

As my username hints at, I'm a lawyer. I'm considering starting my own firm as a solo practitioner. I need a computer and/or laptop for it, and as a new business my budget would be pretty tight. I've mostly only ever used windows, but I'm getting fed up with the bullshit, so I'm considering going with Linux.

I assume Linux is capable of doing everything I need, which is primarily handling word documents, viewing PDFs, watching evidence videos, and online research. But my concern is that some of the more commonly used video types might have trouble on Linux, or that some of the word document templates I use in Windows might have compatibility issues.

I'm also nervous about using an OS I'm not familiar with for business purposes right away.

So I guess I'm asking a few questions. What is a reliable yet affordable option to get started? Are my concerns based in reality or is Linux going to be able to handle everything windows does without issues? What else might I need to know to use Linux comfortably from the get go? Is it going to take a lot of time and effort to get Linux running how I need it to?

For reference, I do consider myself to be somewhat tech-savvy. I don't code or anything, but I've built my last two home computers myself and I'm not scared of general software management, I just don't make it myself.

So, yeah, sell me on Linux, please.

143 comments

  • I use linux to run my law office, so it can be done. Most of what I use is web-based these days, so headaches are minor. That being typed, I've been using linux off and on since the 1990s, and there was a fair amount of learning involved. A few notes:

    -Libreoffice is good enough for document drafting, unless you're extremely reliant on templates generated in Word. Even then, that's a few hours of clerical work that you can farm out with, presumably, no confidentiality issues to flag. Also bear in mind that if you end up using different Linux distributions on more than one computer, then you may run into minor formatting differences between different versions of your word processing software. Microsoft Office will be a reliable option unless you run windows as a virtual machine. There are workarounds, but they aren't business ready.

    -Some aspects of PDF authoring can be tricky if you're doing discovery prep, redaction, and related tasks in-house. This is very workflow-specific, so if you're not a litigator or your jurisdiction doesn't have a lot of specific requirements for pdf submissions, it might not be something that you need to worry about. If it becomes a problem, then a Windows virtual machine might be a solution.

    -Video support depends greatly on the linux distribution, so you may want to do a bit of research and avoid distributions like Fedora, where certain mainstream AV formats are not supported by default for philosophical/licensing reasons.

    -Compatibility with co-counsel and clients will be hit or miss. I don't let anything leave my office that hasn't been converted to PDF and I only do collaboration when there is a special request to do so. I can fall back on a computer that I have which runs Office. It sounds like you have more than one computer, so you can have a backup plan.

    -Hardware support is critical. If you need to videoconference and it turns out that your webcam doesn't have a linux driver, then you may be hosed. Research and test on the front-end so that you don't find yourself in an embarrassing situation of your own making.

    -Learning curves cost money. If you're using an entirely new set of user software AND you're hopping between different distributions to find the version of linux that works for you, you'll waste a LOT of time that you could be using to generate billable work.

  • Don’t do it.

    First off, I love Linux. It’s my daily driver and I wouldn’t want to use anything else.

    But in my past career I was the CIO at a very large firm. Lawyers need Microsoft Office and Windows. If you hire a good assistant or paralegal with word processing experience, they are going to need Microsoft Word. LibreOffice is good, but it’s not a replacement in this scenario. Good word processors are like wizards and will save you hours. It’s not worth it to make them learn something else.

    Then there’s drafting software, templating, practice-specific tools, etc. Anything geared for legal is going to run on Windows. What are you using for time entry? What about accounting?

    Not to mention, you have some information security obligations under the model rules and you don’t want to mess with that. Although Linux has security advantages over Windows, you still have to take measures to secure it. Maybe that’s easy enough for you to do on your own laptop, but your practice will grow to at least a few staff and an associate. Somebody has to do IT because you’re sure as hell not going to waste billable hours on it.

    I had to use Windows in that old gig and it really wasn’t bad. It’s stable, reliable, easy to support. Everyone you hire will have used it before. It’s an unpopular opinion around here, but it’s a quality operating system that’s affordable. I guarantee your cost of ownership will be lower on Windows in your particular situation.

  • I'm a software engineer, and I've used Linux on my computer for work before when my company allowed Linux installs on their computers (most don't in my experience). I don't recommend it for you.

    For me, my main productivity tools, even proprietary ones, run natively on Linux. I very very rarely have to do anything involving word processing. When I do open source or in-browser word processors are enough. Windows can also be a constant headache to use in a lot of software development settings. It's a horrible development environment. I try to avoid working on Windows as much as I can.

    When something breaks (and on Linux, something eventually will), I have more than a decade of technical experience in computing I can fall back on to fix the issue myself. My work computer has failed to boot before and all I had to diagnose and fix the issue was a black screen with a terminal prompt. Even my company's outsourced IT company had very little experience with Linux and I was largely on my own to fix it when things went wrong.

    For you I don't think it would make sense for basically all the opposite reasons. I imagine you'll be doing heavy word processing and editing a lot of documents that need to be formatted correctly. Browser based and open source word processing are probably not going to cut it. I'm not sure if there are any proprietary file formats you may come across in the legal field, but if there are do you want to have to ask people "could you send that in a different format? I can't open that on Linux."

    If something goes wrong on your machine you may not have all the experience to resolve it quickly on your own which could impact your business. Windows can break too but there's a lot more support out there and the barrier is much lower to fix most issues (I can't remember the last time I had to bust out a terminal to fix something on windows)

    For all its faults, windows is pretty well set up for your typical use case.

    If there's a compromise here, you could try having a computer running windows and another running Linux. Having a backup in case something goes wrong isn't a bad idea anyway. Dual booting is also an option. I made it through college for a CS degree with a dual boot Windows+Ubuntu laptop.

    Whatever you end up doing, be sure to have a really good plan in place for backing up everything you need, especially files. Your computer can fail you at any time, Windows or Linux.

  • A lot of people lately have whined that Linux people are zealoted evangelists. You sure wouldn't know that in this thread... Most popular jist of responses is "make sure its the right tool for the job first"

  • My general advice would be: look at the apps you use (or would need to use) on Windows. If you're generally dealing with word documents, PDF's, webpages, and videos that are viewable on VLC.

    See if LibreOffice/OpenOffice/OnlyOffice on Windows work as expected for the documents. If not, see if M365 through the browser does (your can run Edge on Linux and accessing the MS ecosystems seem to be the primary reason many do so.

    If you can't do those things, Linux may not be for you, or at least may not meet the needs for your work.

    For personal use, I'm all with users taking the plunge, seeing if Linux works for them, and/or some the adjustments they need to make. For many, it's a matter of a different UI for the same applications/tasks, but less invasive while being more customizable. In many cases I dual-booting or a VM, in case that user runs into a special case holding them to Windows (maybe a particular game). You could also dual-boot and flip to Windows if the edge cases it's needed are few and far between, but you'd still need to make sure to keep both OS's updated.

    For a business user who may face time crunches, the last thing I'd want is for somebody to find out that the proprietary file format they're provided in the regular course of business only works on a proprietary software that only runs on Windows.

    At the very least, grab a cheap windows license (got can purchase legit pro license codes online for cheap and then download the image for a USB installer from MS), run Linux as your primary and keep a Windows install in a VM (i.e. using KVM/libvirtd) for a bit in case edge cases emerge. For those that just need business apps (i.e. not games, graphics-intensive design tools or social hardware) that'll bridge the gap just fine.

    Another option would be to try something like Windows with Ubuntu installed via WSL (subsystem for Linux) and i.e. MobaXterm to access the various Linux graphical apps. However that pretty much gives you access to Linux tools without the OS UI, and all the headaches of running with an MS operating system as the primary.

    For my own job, I could go 90%-95% of what I need purely in Linux, with the 5-10% left being stuff like editing Visio documents, screen-sharing with sound or only for a specific app (in our workplace's conference app). Assuming you only need to join Teams/Zoom/etc conferences with audio and video, that part works fine from browser in either OS.

    In short... it's a business, so I can't recommend just diving in, but it's for the same reasons I wouldn't recommend a business just switch their vehicle fleet to 100% EV's or move their office to a different city/state/country without a well thought-out transition plan, preferably built in stages. It may work out great and overall be a better experience nearly all the time, but if it prevents work at a crucial moment without a backup plan that can still be a deal breaker.

  • This post reads like it was written like a lawyer.

    Anyway what personally would do it get one Linux device and one windows device. You can then use both but you will have a backup.

  • I’m also nervous about using an OS I’m not familiar with for business purposes right away.

    Keep using what gets the job done. That's what computers are for. Do not switch to Linux.

  • I think you should absolutely download a Linux distro or three along with VirtualBox and try it out. Look at a couple different desktops, play with cowsay, have a good time.

    Don't switch to an unfamiliar operating system on a work machine without doing a lot of learning first.

    Linux itself works in a very different way to Windows. The file system is fundamentally different, for one. You should learn how the Linux file system works, how it's structured, how users and permissions work, etc.

    You would be amazed the little things I've seen people lose their shit over. Give a small example, I saw a guy blow all the way up because Linux doesn't use the word "shortcut." You know how in Windows, you can have an icon on your desktop with that little arrow next to it, and it might start a program, or it might open an individual file? In Linux, those concepts are called Launchers and Links respectively. There's a lot of little details like that. Keyboard shortcuts, what the middle mouse button does, all that kind of stuff is different as well, and that kind of thing even varies between distros.

    You'll have to learn how to administer the system, how to keep up with updates, how to take and restore backups for your files and for the system. How to secure the system.

    The bigger thing is going to be the software library. The phrase "word documents" stands out to me. There are several different productivity suites and word processors available for Linux, none of them are perfectly compatible with MS Word. In college I found that LibreOffice was perfectly adequate for projects I was doing myself. MLA formatted essay? No problem at all. Group project where you have to work together on a powerpoint presentation? Functionally impossible. I've given plenty of talks using LibreOffice Impress for visual aids, it works fine, but it interoperates with MS PowerPoint about as well as my cat does. If you're expected to communicate documents to other lawyers, the government etc. in .docx format...Linux may not be the best choice at least yet.

    Your Word templates and such would likely have to be converted or redone. You don't need to install a Linux machine to find that out; you can install LibreOffice on a Windows machine and try it out.

    PDF support is a bit better with the exception of forms. I forget exactly why, which organization was being a little pissy diaper bitch about putting closed source components in an open standard, was it Adobe themselves or the USPS of all people (why do I remember they're involved?), but PDF forms aren't well supported in PDF readers and writers available for Linux, and Adobe doesn't publish Acrobat for Linux. Typing up a word processing document and saving it as a PDF, opening a PDF and looking at it? Those work perfectly fine.

    Viewing videos and that sort of thing, I've never run into a problem with that sort of thing on Linux, VLC is present and accounted for, and codecs aren't the nightmare they were back in the heyday of Windows Media Player.

    Affordable we got. Linux and practically the entire software ecosystem are available for free, and Linux will run very well on computers that Windows doesn't. I've got a Dell here from 2012, it's got an Intel Core i7 with three digits in the part number, it doesn't run Win11 and feels like shit running Win10, feels brand new running Linux Mint. You don't need to buy a brand new top of the line machine to get a decent experience out of a typical Linux distro.

    You expressed some concerns about not being a programmer. You don't need to be a programmer to use Linux, at least not this decade. It probably helped in the 90's. I will say though, one of the biggest advantages of Linux is how close at hand scripting tools like Bash and Python are. For example, I have a script that converts .docx files to .pdf files without launching any applications, and it appears in the right click menu when I right click a .docx file so it's convenient to run. It's like a two line bash script with a 7 line config file that's mostly stuff like what text and icon to put in the right click menu. This doesn't require a degree in computer science. On any platform, you might want to look at an autokeyer, which can save you a surprising amount of time.

    • I will strongly second the "don't use an unfamiliar OS for critical work tasks" sentiment.

      I got a MacBook for work, before I had ever used mavOS before and it was absolutely infuriating and anxiety inducing because I couldn't get my actual job done.

      The OS was in the way. And it was small simple things. I shit you not trying to just use the "delete" key made me almost throw the MacBook out the window.

      • And if I may expand upon this, I bet you don't think this is MacOS being objectively terrible. There are lots of Mac users and they seem to get along with it just fine, and in fact they look at you weird for fussing about it.

        I've often pointed at an LTT video where they had iJustine on as a guest, and Linus and Justine swapped platforms, him on a Mac and her on a Windows PC, and they were given a series of tasks such as "install Slack. Take a screenshot. Save that screenshot as a PDF. Save that PDF to a thumb drive. Attach it to a Slack message" etc. And both of them hit points where they said "Oh, you're going to struggle with that." Apparently the keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot on a Mac makes no intuitive sense, and at least at the time Windows 10 didn't ship with software capable of saving a word processing document as a PDF. They both struggled, and they both hit things where they thought someone unfamiliar with the platform would struggle.

        Just as you will encounter culture shocks transitioning from Windows to MacOS, you will encounter culture shocks transitioning from Windows to Linux. The time to get used to a new OS isn't when a client needs some important documents right away.

        Do not get me wrong, OP. I would love to see your independent law firm running open source software rather than relying on the megacorporate duopoloy. I think you can do it, but I want to be clear that you will likely need retraining and experience in the new platform.

        I do strongly encourage trying a distro or three out in VirtualBox, right there on your Windows machine. Give it a look, play around, follow some tutorials, have some fun. Install VLC and LibreOffice on your Windows machine and see if they'll do the work you need them to. I also strongly encourage you to come tell us how it goes.

  • I've worked with lawyers a bit in an IT role so I'll put it bluntly. Don't bother.

    Why? You have to ensure complete compatibility with Microsoft Office standards in your job and you may also need to access third-party systems especially document management systems on a regular basis. These things require Windows. It's a sad fact of life that your colleagues being able to read your documents and ensure consistent layout is more important than anything else.

    Yes, you can try Libre Office and soforth. However, the moment the court staff, other lawyers or anybody else gets a jumbled mess you're going to cause yourself more problems than it's worth. Even you yourself need to be able to ensure compatibility when it comes to information storage and retrieval too.

    Windows licences are essentially free with your devices anyway and the cost of Office is a couple of hundred bucks top. Money might be tight but losing information from your court cases could put you out of business.

    Sorry Linux fanboys, but Windows is the superior option here as much as I wish it was not. It's simply the best tool for the job.

    • First: windows isn't the superior option. This is basically windows being VHS, Linux being betamax. Linux is vastly superior, but it's just that Microsoft marketing is too good at lying.

      Second: Linux is very apt at running Microsoft programs, including office.

      Third: fuck Microsoft office, use online office in a browser. Microsoft office 365 if you're dumb (because my god, it's cringy bad, or google docs if you want it easy (eats most Ms crap with little to no trouble) or if you want to go truely open source, setup nextcloud with only office.

      Side comment: if governments or courts FOCRE you to pay money to a specific company to use services that can quite easily be done by open source alternatives then I say that smells like corruption and or incompetence.

      • You are right in everything except that it's absolutely not the superior option in OPs situation. A lawyer has to guarantee that a document is identical and recallable in its exact form even years from now and the only way to absolutely ensure this is using Office itself.

        Furthermore, most law firms use and have to access other parties document management systems and the thick clients for these with all the features only run on Windows. Screwing around with WINE to get these maybe working isn't worth the hassle for a time-poor lawyer with cases to work on.

        Computers are just another tool in the box when it comes to your business and you should use the best version of it to get the job done. It's simply only Windows in OPs case here that's the viable option. It might be corruption or vendor lock in or whatever but there's no point trying to fight it in this scenario.

      • About your side comment - It isn't necessarily that they're being forced to use Office. It's more that office is the standard that everyone else is using, and therefore the standard everyone expects to work with. If anything breaks or displays incorrectly, it becomes your fault for not using the standard.

        To be clear, I hate Microsoft and their monopoly, and the blaming I just described as well. It definitely happens though. Same reason most of Gen Z uses iPhones: if you have an Android phone any problem with phones/chatting suddenly becomes your fault, even if the underlying reason is actually because of Apple.

  • don't go all in on linux when you're already trying to get a new business up and running. it's stressful enough without relearning an entire new os.

    just install linux through virtualbox on top of windows or use a bootable usb/dvd to test drive it before you take the plunge and go all in.

    if you really want to, you can install MATE on an amazon linux ec2 instance or get familiar with the command line on a micro sized free tier version.

    or, for a more entry friendly approach, just enable wsl2 in windows 11 and get familiar with both gui programs and the command line. it's not perfect but it will give you a better understanding of the underlyings of linux without having to give up the programs you're ready for. when you're comfortable, you can go further.

  • Linux is about protecting your freedom as a pc user. It means the software should always work for you, never against you, and you should have the right to inspect the code, modify it at will, and even sell it on or give it away for free

    There are no licence fees, no tie in, and it runs faster on your pc then windows. It doesn't spy on your nor force updates on you.

    It should run on most computers but occasionally you may have to install additional WiFi or graphics card drivers but it's not that common anymore.

    You should definitely test it first, and try do everything you do on Windows, on Linux. To do this you can either install it alongside Windows or on a separate test pc or Intel it in a virtual machine on your pc

    You can also use a live usb which lets you see it in action running off a usb stick but you can't install additional software so it's a limited experience.

    I unequivocally recommend Linux Mint over any other Linux. I've seen the other comments but this is by far the best best Linux distro and the one you'll feel most comfortable on. There are other advantages as well but you'll learn that.

    Linux Mint: https://linuxmint.com/

    Virtual box(software for running vm's): https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

    As for Office you have several choices:

    1. If you pay monthly for Office you can access the full suite online via a browser. It should do everything the desktop version does.
    2. Install Office alternatives that exist for Linux. There are 2 good choices to try:

    A) OnlyOffice: https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop.aspx

    B) WPS Office: https://www.wps.com/

    In both cases you'll need to download the deb file to install it. Deb files are like exe but for Debian and Ubuntu based Linux, think Mint is. They are the most widely available format.

    I wouldn't bother with the built in Libre Office as it's not quite there yet. OnlyOffice can also do some PDF handling as well. You typically won't find free PDF software for Linux as it's proprietary software and companies like OnlyOffice likely pay Adobe some licencing fees to offer PDF edit functionality.

    It might sound difficult but it's not, especially if you enjoy computers. If not, ask an IT or nerd friend you might have for help.

    Good luck.

  • You can't be sold on Linux. Anyone 'sold on' or 'lead to' Linux isn't going to stick with it. The desire to learn to use and be productive with Linux is purely an internal one. Selling you on it would be like trying to push you into a religion. For this, you need to sell yourself on Linux. Install it, run it, make it your daily system for a few weeks or months... then you can decide if it is for you. The questions you'll need to find answers to are, but not limited to:

    • Will it run the software I need? You mention PDF's... Viewing non-encrypted PDF's is no problem. For encrypted PDF forms that I've seen from some government sites, I needed Windows or Mac to fill them out reliably. I was able to do some within Wine, but that wasn't stable enough to depend on.
    • Be aware there are desktop choices. Linux comes in many flavours, some can present and work similar to a Windows desktop workflow, some more similar to Mac (but not quite), and some are just either heritage UNIX styles or just Linux unique. Finding what you prefer can take some trial and effort.
    • I suggest Linux distributions that offer disk encryption (and be sure to use it). If you were my lawyer, I wouldn't want the documents we share to be left around un-encrypted anywhere.

    Check out some Linux periodicals, as well. They can help wet your whistle with reviews on various Linux distributions and often some introductory articles on software and How-To's. If that kind of thing interests you, you've already half sold yourself on Linux.

  • Others have given you some good advice but I'll still give you my opinion because more data points is good.

    First of all, as others said, it's better perhaps if you switch your home computer first or try it out on a VM or dual-boot first as you learn how to use it rather than erasing Windows altogether at first. Regardless of your choice I'd recommend giving it a try still.

    Affordability is not a concern at all, most Linux Distros are free and they'll work perfectly fine, usually when you pay for distros you're either paying for better tech support or to support the distro itself, and a lot of the software that's on the repos is also free.

    Your biggest concern probably would be re-learning the OS. Now, obviously Linux and windows work very differently, for example installing software on Linux is mainly done via an app-store or the terminal. As for graphics, shortcuts, etc, there's two approaches here, which one is better depends on your preferences. You can either stick to something similiar to windows, so any distro that has Cinnamon, KDE plasma, or Xfce (you will have to move a few stuff and configure it a bit at the beginning) will do well, I'd recommend Linux Mint; or you can do something more different that will force you to learn something new and will tell you visually "Look, I'm not windows, I'm built different!" so something like GNOME (or customize the other DEs to something you like), personally I'm not a fan of GNOME but it works well for your use-case, as any DE will do, in this case I recommend Pop!_OS.

    Both of my recommendetions use apt and are debian (through Ubuntu as the middledistro) derivatives btw. This is important because when you encounter a problem or a certain software not being in the repo it is good to look for sources closely related to your distro.

    Linux can do everything you mentioned and more, however compatibility with M$ Word documents/etc can be a bit iffy. Personally I always used LibreOffice and aside from some minor annoyances never had issues with it and using .docx but I also don't work at a professional environment that requires it to work perfectly. However you're in luck as you can still use M$ office & other stuff from your browser if needed, tho I assume it will have less resources and will require an internet connection (this can be mitigated by working offline with LibreOffice, OpenOffice or any Office suite you like then copy-pasting it to M$ word or whatever), tho I wouldn't know since I don't use either and never planning on doing so. There's also google docs.

    Video types should work just fine especially common ones, VLC is a powerful tool. If you're installing Mint make sure to install the media codecs at install.

    Also I recommend learning the terminal, it may seem scary at first but it is easy, fast and will help you troubleshoot. Also accept that you will encounter problem, like in every system, and you're expected to solve them yourself, this means you can spend a lot of time looking up stuff, learning to look at logs, etc. This will of course take time but it would take as much if not more time on windows too sometimes, on the bright side Linux tends to be a little better at telling you the problem if you know what to look for and also you almost never have to deal with an issue until the company fixes it, you can literally go and fix the code yourself if needs be. Anyways, on this end I recommend using a stable distribution (like the ones I mentioned), stick to the official repos as much as possible, and at install make a separate partition for your home folder, that way worst case scenario you can always just reinstall the OS (takes 15 mins) without losing your files*. Also, this goes for everything and I can't stress it enough: MAKE FREQUENT BACKUPS, and better yet do them in multiple places: Proton Drive, external hard disk/USB, an other drive on your PC, whatever just have at least one, preferably 2+, place that isn't your computer or its main drive be your backup space. This goes for Windows too and even though I assume you know it I will still say it because it's extremely important and always overlooked.

    *Unless you erase the partition by mistake or something.

    P.S. also given the nature of your job, you might want to encrypt the hard disk (write the password somewhere and make sure to use a password specifically for it and one you can remember, password managers/generators don't help here) and learn to use the gpg command when you need to encrypt and sign documents.

  • Linux is usually light compared to windows, and no nonsense bloatware and faster to run. Plus is customizable.

    If you are a lawyer I assume you are looking for stability and prefer simple over complex. So my guess is that Debian(since is the most stable rock solid distro) would suit you, and most importantly is the desktop environment, if you are looking something similar to Windows I would choose KDE Plasma and if you like MacOS interface then Gnome. Both of them are very different but customizable, I find Gnome is simpler and less busy and Plasma is full of features but busy IMO. Oh and Cinnamon desktop environment is best of both worlds I think. If you are concerned about security and encryption then I'm afraid I can't advice you on that. Finally I recommend looking up in "distrowatch" if you are looking for something most specific, most distros come with Libre Office as some of the comments point out. There are some distros specifically made for business wich I would recommend if you go big.

    Here is a post I made of my desktop with Gnome so that you can see how it look and feels.

    https://feddit.cl/pictrs/image/39b62b9a-ebfa-4d4e-a944-4a58cc765357.png

  • It's about being in the free software ecosystem, which is really a licensing issue.

    Forcing people to contribute their modifications to software when they are editing free software ensures we're never dependent on the decisions of one entity. This is what the GNU General Public License (GPL) is all about.

    If we don't like what someone did, we can take that part out and redistribute a better version that we can continue to modify. This might not matter to someone who doesn't program, but it should.

    You don't have to be the one to get your hands dirty with code. Just being a user in the ecosystem opens you up to these benefits. Other people are going to take advantage of them, and you can just piggyback on their work.

    I, personally, think it's always just a matter of time before businesses make products worse by charging more/giving less. Look at Adobe. Look at Microsoft. Look at Apple. All of them want to lock people into endless subscriptions because they're dependent on their ecosystem. What happens when Adobe decides they're not charging enough for photoshop? They charge more, and everyone just has to deal with it. Same goes for Office. Same goes for Apple, they just do it the old-fashioned way by charging for the latest versions and making you buy new hardware.

  • As a lawyer you should always use Linux.

    Have a LUKS encrypted hard drive.

    Video formats? There literally are VLC, ffmpeg and MPV. Every normal format works on every Distro.

    Get most apps from Flathub.org, use any Distro you want but I recommend Fedora Kinoite.

    Word documents for sure, PDF editing actually too. PDF editing is cursed in itself, but Okular + PDF arranger + Firefox + sometimes GIMP (for actually censoring) work.

    Have a look at Stirling PDF, a project combining all of these effords. Its not yet a fully graphical desktop app but this command will work on Fedora Kinoite: 

     undefined
        
podman run -d \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v /location/of/trainingData:/usr/share/tesseract-ocr/4.00/tessdata \
  frooodle/s-pdf:latest

    Then you can use StirlingPDF in your browser by opening localhost:8080

    Use any modern Linux Distro and stay away from outdated Desktops like Mint (Cinnamon), XFCE, Budgie, Mate etc.

  • For opening Word documents, I'd highly recommend OnlyOffice. Has outstanding compatibility with documents originally created in Microsoft Word, and it's free on Flathub

    Another alternative if you have an existing 365 subscription would be the online version of Word in your web browser.

    If you're heavily into the 365 ecosystem though, do note that things like Onedrive compatibility aren't all the way there on linux, so you'd miss luxuries like right-clicking a file and getting a shareable link, or sending a file to someone directly from the file manager. For these you'll need to drag-n-drop the file into onedrive, or into your email app to send them.

    Things like opening PDFs, viewing various video formats etc, are built-in and work flawlessly on pretty much all Linux distros. Support for opening encrypted PDF files should be flawless too, haven't had issues with these myself.

    Would recommend Linux Mint, or Zorin OS, as both have a pretty similar look and feel when coming from Windows

    • OnlyOffice. Has outstanding compatibility with documents

      It might be decent, but is isn't "outstanding", advanced formatting and features sometimes fails. Another thing about OnlyOffice is that it is a web app, it might work fine for smaller documents, however when you've to load a 50+ page document scrolling around becomes really bad as you'll have to scroll and wait 1-2 seconds for each page to load.

      Things like opening PDFs, viewing various video formats etc, are built-in and work flawlessly on pretty much all Linux distros

      It isn't "flawlessly". Forms in PDFs aren't supported properly.

  • Its fun to open the terminal and learning the language of the computer, even if it disagree with you sometimes. Most times. Also i can do anything, including messing it up irreparably!

  • That is like, trying to convince a meat lover to eat veggies (only) but seriously? Just download an iso @ https://linuxmint.com/, give it a spin. It's free. Be aware that "It's not Windows" so expect some things to not behave "by the Windows logic". "Duckduckgo is your friend", even if it means asking the most trivial things "How do I install $thing on Linux mint?", and you'll be just fine.

  • Linux is stable if you use a distro that's known to be stable, example: Linux mint. This is one of the "just works" distros. There are a couple, but I highly recommend mint. Linux can do all of what you need done, from documents, PDFs to viewing all kinds of videos. I've never once run into any issue doing any of that. You have libreoffice and onlyoffice that have amazing compatibility with MS office. If anything, you can use the MS office suite online and call it a day. Hell, you can use Google's office suite, too. PDFs? Zero worries. Videos are good, too. We do have VLC which basically plays anything you throw at it. However, since you have a business and want to make sure things always work, I do recommend that you keep at least one windows machine in the office for just in case. I don't have a business, but I've always had this one laptop that runs windows. I debloated the shit out of it. Blocked all of the telemetry using Microsoft's own firewall and it's sitting there for just in case.

    Edit: forgot to mention that you are always welcome to come here and ask if you needed help. I find the Lemmy Linux community to be extremely helpful. Everyone jumps in to help every time I had a question.

  • if you are using latest nvidia hardware and one of your favourite software does not work on Linux. just stay away from it

  • You're already fed up by Windows, so why use it?

    You'll probably be forced to use some Windows programs specific to your profession. You might not have a huge choice.

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