this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Yes, small things could quickly put ordinary people off Linux with the current state of software. I'm involved in running an organization that needs to submit reports regularly to the government using their online forms. Unfortunately the forms are PDFs that only seem to work in recent versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Any other software results in a more or less broken form. I haven't yet found anything in Linux (even on Wine) that handles these forms properly. So sometimes I have to use Windows.
For me there are still enough benefits to using Linux that I continue with it as my main OS, but for most people they'd quickly get annoyed by obstacles like this. Of course the government shouldn't be using one company's proprietary format that only runs on commercial OSes for their forms, but that's the way it is for now.
The gov and higher education should be forced to use open source software. I would absolutely support that.
Well, the PDF format was created by Adobe and even though they somehow got it to technically be considered an open document format. They are to my knowledge still the only entity with a complete implementation in existence. Just some food for thought.