Is a Linux Operating system good for everyone?

Short answer, no!

Are you a business? (skip to individual user if this does not apply)

This could work for a small business, follow individual user below to check but as enterprise, I would strongly suggest sticking with the setup you have UNLESS you can match the individual user setup below. Enterprise and large business often use custom applications which will not be designed for, or work on other operating systems. Saying that though, a number of software manufacturers DO provide alternative installation options.

In large business, its not always about the OS though. For example, group policy is used to deliver settings to systems on Windows but cannot be used on Macs or Linux. Mac have Profile Manager which "kind of" integrates with windows but its a headache to maintain, especially if you need heavy restrictions.

File systems aren't too bad but server storage and a central set of users (active directory and server shares) may need a complete rethink so this also becomes a big job, ESPECIALLY if you want to migrate.

Advice is TEST, TEST, TEST.

Web and internet based businesses, go for it. You generally run from a version control system and the majority of the web functions use Linux these days.

• Vagrant - yes
• Apache - yes
• PHP - yes
• MySQL - yes
• Composer - yes
• Laravel - yes
• Zend - yes

You get the picture.

Are you an individual user?

Chances are, your an individual or low usage user. That's the majority of people out there and Windows is the easiest option as it comes pre-installed on many systems at a slight premium to the hardware. Lets see if any of the usage scenarios are you:

• Word processing and office products
• Internet
• Gaming
• Music
• Videos
• Photography

I bet over 95% of people use their computers and laptops for at least one of the above. Lets see what we can do then!

Word processing, spreadsheets etc.

Typical windows setup

• Office 365 / Microsoft Office
• Including Word, Excel, PowerPoint

Ubuntu's typical configuration comes loaded with LibreOffice (you can try it for free on Windows, you don't pay for it as its open source software). LibreOffice has Write (Word), Calc (Excel) and Impress (PowerPoint) as the alternative software AND GUESS WHAT. Yes, that's right, it's compatbile with office file formats meaning you can open all your old documents, spreadsheets and slideshows! This also means you can save in the Microsoft file format and still be compatible with everyone else you know.

Issues?

Well, actually, a couple but fairly minor. The way LibreOffice renders pages means that you will always get a very slight variant from a Microsoft product. Microsoft don't follow the document XML model very well and implement their own way of working on documents which means proprietary rendering fixes to make things look slightly different. Have you ever tried working with tables in Word? You will know what I mean when I say, they just don't do what you want all the time. 

There's a great video about this on youtube talking about why word documents just don't work the same everywhere.

The internet

Strangely enough, I don't really need to go into this but a number of people may not realise. Ubuntu (it's my go to Linux OS for describing things but its not the only one) comes with Firefox preloaded but this doesn't mean some of your other favourite browsers can't be used. I use Opera and that's available to download straight from the Ubuntu software centre. Google's Chrome also can be downloaded and used meaning you can transfer that same experience across to a Linux OS. As you can probably imagine, this doesn't stretch to Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge OR Safari (If you are a Mac/iOS user). Generally speaking, you don't need the older internet browsers for any mainstream site any more but for some specific Microsoft or very legacy applications (usually in Business) there is still a very slight need.

I'm going to circle back to gaming at the end, skipping on

Photography, Music and Videos

I'm lumping this in all in one here just to demonstrate my confidence on this.

Videos can be played back on any operating system these days and any Linux desktop environment is no exception. If you want to be sure it'll play, I'd suggest installing VLC Media player as this covers a wide variety of different playback formats for videos AND audio. Ubuntu comes preloaded with a Videos application and RythmBox which is an audio application so there are some alternate options available. Of course things like Netflix, Deezer, Spotify and all the other streaming options can be used through the internet browser still so no need to worry on that front.

File system (I've added this in)

There is one major difference between Windows and Linux however in its file system. It can be hard to get your head around to start with but its quite simple when you get the hang of it.

Windows uses drives to navigate

Linux uses mounts

For example:

Home documents directory

Windows - c:\users\joebloggs\Documents

Linux - /home/joebloggs/Documents

So basically, Linux works from the root, i.e. / directory and doesn't need drives. Stick a DVD in and it'll mount it to /mnt/cdrom ; memory sticks /mnt/tempstickname etc. The file explorer looks a little different but its all there and drives are displayed as drives but without the letter (c: d: etc).

Gaming

This is a deal breaker for gamers and even I am on the edge of changing my main machine. Microsoft has made MANY MANY games incompatible since the rise of 64 bit machines. The technology change WAS needed but gamers didn't get the compatibility layer that 16 bit got from the change to 32 bit. This means that a vast library of disk games suddenly became out of date. DOSBOX helps with that on Windows, at least bringing the DOS games back to life but not everything. The great news is that DOSBOX works on Linux too!

As for more modern games, a majority of PC gamers use Steam. Steam has been developing something called proton which allows Windows games to run on Linux. It works. I have yet to find a Windows game that does not run using proton. I will write a guide to installation of Steam and proton at some point and link it on here. It's pretty easy for those of us with AMD graphics cards as Ubuntu in particular installs the drivers for them when you set it up. As for NVidia, there are ways and until I try it out with an NVidia card, I won't be able to confirm if this works well for them or not.

Other games

Well, as nice as it is having DOS and Steam games working, does it work with other games? Sort of. It really depends on the game. I do need to do more extensive testing on these types of games to be completely sure about what works and what doesn't but as a general rule, if it uses MSI files, it probably will have trouble installing.