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’re awesome! I hope you succeed in what you do!
Also, where are you located? Are you hiring? ;)
Thanks!
The main office is in Calgary, but we have branches in Halifax and Vancouver as well. We’re looking to acquire a branch manager for Vancouver, or a sole-prop or MSP in Medicine Hat or basically anywhere else in Canada that would like an easier job and shares in an actually good company / co-op. Heck, a brilliant sales person would also be awesome.
Any advice for a South-East Asian jobseeker? Would I be qualified over there?
That deeply depends on the company and the certifications you’d acquired along the way. Some companies I worked at required an ever-escalating number of MS certs. For us, it’s a bit different though.
I always say that it’s easy to train someone in tech if they’ve got that mindset, but it’s damn near impossible to train someone to be good with people. We pride ourselves on being good people first so we generally don’t hire outside of other people we’ve worked with in the past.
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.
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.
OpenSuse
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!
Dear OP. You are awesome. Forget the haters.
Love.
Man this thread was a rollercoaster. Seems like you ran into some incredibly fragile egos. For what it’s worth, I switched my 73 year old dad and his business to ZorinOS (An Ubuntu-based distro designed for former Windows users to easily switch to Linux) with LibreOffice, Thunderbird, and Firefox. Granted he’s a solo shop, but he was able to pick up ZorinOS fairly easily.
Yeah, I was sort of taken aback at the level of open hostility here. I thought Linux users were pretty happy with getting the OS out there.
Anyway, I’ll check out Zorin! Much appreciated. Firefox and Thunderbird are already in use everywhere we can get people to ditch Chrome.
How much ya paying?
This might be the first time in human history anybody’s ever asked for money to talk about Linux to potential converts. (I kid!)
In all seriousness though, I’m just looking for a couple recommendations for improvement, not an implementation. We’d be implementing it ourselves, we just want to make sure that we give the easiest time possible to those coming over from Windows.
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The monthly client fee remains the same regardless of if the clients are on Linux or on Windows. I assure you, we’re not winning new converts with Linux. We are avoiding e-waste and upcycling machines for free. 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. Please explain to me how that isn’t a good thing and is anything other than positive for all involved?
I wasn’t looking for someone to design the entire implementation, just one or two comments saying something to the tune of “X distro is easier for newbies” or something. Were you under the impression that I was trying to get people on a Linux Community to come in and support carpet shop printers or something, or is this kind of weird, misaligned hostility just the general tone I should expect?
You should always expect hostility from Linux users, now scram!
Anyway the stack you mentioned is pretty standard fare for Windows -> Linux transitions. If I had any more notes I’d give em, sorry & good luck!
I appreciate it!
How long has your MSP been around? How many employees?
Nearly 11 years. We have 8 employees and 3 branches.
So you do have some experience then. How do you plan on actually supporting Linux desktops? All of the mainstream vendors are Windows only as Linux on the desktop doesn’t really exist in the views of large companies.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be really cool to have Linux make more of a splash in the SMB space. However, it is tricky to maintain and doesn’t offer much of an advantage over anything else. A business doesn’t care about Linux evangelicalism. It is what makes the money.
Just FYI, 8 people is not medium sized. That is a very small MSP that is no where near the size of medium to large businesses. That doesn’t make it bad but you are not quite in same league. I’ve worked with small MSPs and most of them suck but if you do it right you can actually get a lot of business from small shops as I’m sure you are aware. Some of the crazier MSPs I’ve seen do all sorts of bad and wild things which you probably have seen the aftermath of.
You’re completely missing the point.
You lack knowledge of a specific subject. You’re asking experts for solutions you intend to make money off of. You need to pay for that in any other scenario, so why are you acting like you shouldn’t pay for it in this scenario?
Actually, I’m rather sure you’re missing the point. Explain to me how I’m making money off it, please.
Read my posts throughout this thread. As I said, the Linux stack is not exactly a money maker, it’s more of a passion thing. Also, we’re not “selling it,” it’s something to outfit soon-to-be-sidelined Windows 10 systems with. It will literally cost me more money and hours to keep them from filling a landfill than it would to just dump them. There is no profit motive. No company will join us because of this and no company will leave us if we can’t provide it. Your entire premise is faulty.
I make the same monthly fee as an MSP no matter if the client runs Windows, Linux, or MacOS. The OS is a thing to be maintained by us, not sold. Hell, we provide hardware and software to clients at cost. We profit off nothing but our MRR. We’re very open and honest.
If you really think that saying the name of software that may help users and having an MSP donate monthly to FOSS is bad, then I don’t know what to tell you - we’re fundamentally different people.
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Nope, I’ve never sold a printer in my life beyond what clients have asked us to buy and bring to them. Really, I thought this would just be a fun thread as we’ve already designed everything ourselves. But I should know better than to be a person on the internet… My bad.
Anyway, I run a medium-sized I.T. firm in Canada and designed the company to be as ethical as it could possibly be from the ground up.
- All employees have equal votes after their initial 3 months is up in any part of the company that they are engaged in. I can (and have) been outvoted.
- After employees are here long enough (a few years), they can purchase shares if they like.
- I am the lowest paid full-time employee at the company by design. I do not take dividends.
- We operate on a Matrix org chart meaning that the “boss” on every project changes based on who is best suited to lead it and who has experience in that area.
- We have it in our charter that there are never any outside shareholders allowed. If you leave the company, your shares are purchased by the company for current market value. This includes myself. This is why employees owning shares is a good idea; it becomes a retirement plan. Unlike most corporations, we don’t want solely financially invested shareholders as they’re in business to extract value. They are parasites.
- We have acquired other companies. We have never had to pay for one. Our procedures are so thorough and ticket counts so astronomically low compared with other I.T. companies (which are called MSPs) due to our subsystems and customizations that they literally give themselves to us.
- We are as environmentally conscious as we can be. We redo and donate old systems to nonprofits and schools where we can. The only waste we put out is utterly dead hardware - no forced upgrade cycle. Electricity bills also drop dramatically at clients we take over due to more efficient machine use.
- During COVID, we gave away over $500k in free support. I figured it was more important that our nonprofit clients stay open than we stay open.
- In nearly ten years, we’ve never had an employee leave, and never had a client leave (well, we had one restaurant client close during COVID, but I don’t count that).
- We have full benefits.
- We have zero interest in “infinite growth” as it’s not a functional model. We have turned down clients because they don’t “get” us and would be a headache for our staff.
- Our current goal is a 9-5 (not 8-5), four-day workweek for all staff.
I understand that not every business owner is “good.” I believe that with proper regulation, however, we can make them at least behave way, way the fuck better than they do now.
I’ve built this model out in hopes it will catch on. I feel that if most companies operated under it that society would be substantially better off. Certain aspects of this model are so important and such a step up from the norm that I don’t understand how they weren’t obvious to other owners. But… greed I guess. Greed hurts every system it’s in.
Also of interest, we don’t have an issue with The Peter Principle as you’re never forced to move out of a position of competence or interest. You’re not salary-limited simply because you don’t want to be a manager; in fact, there are no managers.
So more than anything, it’s your hostility that’s telling.
Good luck to you I guess
This isn’t going to work out. The market doesn’t favor ethics or self righteousness. It is highly competitive and you lack experience. Even some basic IT experience will seriously serve you well.
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Anyway, I run a medium-sized I.T. firm in Canada and designed the company to be as ethical as it could possibly be from the ground up.
And yet you are asking for free advice to develop a product to sell.
If you do run a MSP, have you looked internally to your own staff?
Why is asking for advice a bad idea even if there is a commercial interest behind it? At least OP is honest about it. Wonder how many of the “asking for advice” post over the years here and elsewhere have had some kind of commercial interest behind them and OP has not disclosed it.
Yes which is why we have several clients already running our current stack that I outlined above. As I said, it’s not exactly a money maker, it’s more of a passion thing. Also, we’re not “selling it,” it’s something to outfit soon-to-be-sidelined Windows 10 systems with. It will literally cost me more money and hours to keep them from filling a landfill than it would to just dump them. There is no profit motive. No company will join us because of this and no company will leave us if we can’t provide it. Your premise is faulty.
And unfortunately I am also the only Linux user on staff so we are limited to my knowledge and what I can dig up.
Why would I work for YOUR company that is going to be making money off my work for FREE?
I do this for a living, buddy. Do you go to restaurants and ask chefs to come over and cook for you before sit and eat in their restaurant because you need proof it’s good?
🤦
You must be acting all offended on purpose… There is no way from his post that you get the idea that he wants you to work for him. And even if that were the case, if you don’t want to provide advice then why comment? Why are you losing your valuable time here instead of working?
Your comparison is flawed in so many ways… He hasn’t asked anyone to come and cook for him. Following your comparison, he has gone to a community called restaurantfood where there’s a lot of people interested in food and many working with restaurants asking for advice if someone has any to offer on how to improve his menu at his restaurant to provide healthier and better food to his customers.
Providing some advice, specially about free software is not the same as working. Why are you in a community of people sharing information and knowledge of Linux if your only objective is to earn money? Do you get paid for your help to other users? Do you think the only allowed people in this community are the ones that won’t profit off of Linux? Because it seems you do…
Explain to me how I’m making money off it, please.
Read my posts throughout this thread. As I said, the Linux stack is not a money maker, it’s more of a passion thing. Also, we’re not “selling it,” it’s something to outfit soon-to-be-sidelined Windows 10 systems with. It will literally cost me more money and hours to keep them from filling a landfill than it would to just dump them. There is no profit motive. No company will sign with us because of this service and no company will leave us if we can’t provide it. Your entire premise is faulty.
I make the same per-machine monthly fee as an MSP no matter if the client runs Windows, Linux, or MacOS. The OS is a thing to be maintained by us, not sold. Hell, we provide hardware and software to clients at cost. We profit off nothing but our MRR. We’re very open and honest.
If someone really writing the name and use of software that may help users and having an MSP donate monthly to FOSS is bad, then I don’t know what to tell you - we’re fundamentally different people.
And yeah, if I ask a chef what an odd seasoning they use on a dish is and they get all huffy and say “I’M NOT TELLING YOU FOR FREE!” then they’re probably an ass.
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.
This is a bad idea
MSPs serve the customer not the other way around. Don’t go off the beaten trail until you are MSP that has been around for 5 years or more. This isn’t going to go well for many reasons.
We have been around for nearly 11 years now and have had a few requests for something that isn’t Microsoft or Apple. We agree with the clients.
From a MSP perspective you could look at something like Chrome OS or Android. Android especially has lots of support from various vendors and is pretty easy to manage.
Going off the beaten path is probably not going to work out. I’m saying that as someone who has a decent amount of experience with Linux desktops. The reality is Linux desktops are really hard to manage at scale because of the diversity of the ecosystem and the lack of interest. Everything from the security tooling to monitoring is going to be tricky. If you find some vendors that can do it that is great but good luck. Linux distros are not design to be enterprise desktops. You need to figure out Authentication, monitoring, policy and configuration and most importantly security.
I would look into Xfce4 Kiosk mode with a bare bones Linux system that has SElinux configured to lock everything down. You can deploy policy via Ansible Pull and a systemd timer. That still won’t solve monitoring, security or remote access but it will at least get you started. I would read up on TPM chips as Linux does support them for encryption but you need to make sure that you configure them properly. You also should make sure you have a way to remotely trigger a wipe. From a distros perspective I would stick with something like Almalinux or Debian stable along with system flatpacks for apps. (Make sure you lock down the ability for users to install apps)
