Next year Windows 10 goes End of Life. Microsoft will undoubtedly push windows 11 hard, but a lot of machines won’t support it leading to a few economic points of interest:
The demand for new machines will be high, driving up cost.
The supply of unsupported machines will be high, driving down the used market.
Are you all ready?
We are trialing about 20 Linux desktops (10 Linux mint and 10 zorin OS) across 2 of our MSP clients.
So far, they have had zero technical tickets in 6 months. They did have double the average user training tickets compared to windows machines. Most of the questions were around how to work with editable PDFs and where is the document was they just saved (file manager questions).
Zorin OS seems to be winning on the usability metrics. Its very polished and more closely matching the UI of people coming from windows.
Are there any windows programs you’ve had to set up through wine?
Not in our case. We only take on clients that converted to browser based apps. Bit we are yet to convert the heavy excel users. The one we have converted are light Excel users and online excel is working just fine for them.
It’s my only hangup. I vba on the regular. Work forced win11 on me, but at home, once i can be assed, I’ll vm windows eventually and migrate completely, and scheme alternative languages for my spreadsheet wizardry lmao
Libre calc Scripting imo is more matured and better than excel. Better and far more popular language (python or javascript equally far better than vb)
I’ve heard good things but haven’t looked into it yet. Thing is, I got so good at vba that I got a promotion out of it lmao. As archaic as it is, my work is essentially hardcoded in windows for the foreseeable future, so I have to be able to dick around in msoffice.
If you want yet another promotion you know what to do next
I highly recommend skilling up asap. Its really eol. Nothing stopping you from changing your code to python (which is supported in excel) with the goal to migrate out to either an application or FOSS office suite. LibreOffice costs your corpo IT nothing to deploy unlike MS Office which costs to buy and keeps costing with every proprietary service and feature you use.