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.
Since you seem to be pre-installing and configuring everything beforehand I’d recommend looking into OpenSuse instead of Mint as it’s an enterprise oriented distro. It has a lot of easy to use gui and cli admin tools (yast) that make life a lot easier for maintaining the distro.
Oh neat, I didn’t know that this existed! Thank you very much! It seems like it would take the sting out of hand-configuring every workstation we deploy.
No problem. Since you plan to use FOSS in your product it would be nice if you’d donate money to FOSS projects as a thanks.
Already do! We support every project we use with roughly equivalent “license fees” to what we’d pay to non-FOSS.
That’s awesome!
YaST is seriously a game changer for managing multiple systems - it’s basially the closest thing Linux has to Group Policy in the Windows world and makes mass configuration so much easir.