There is minimal downside to switching to open models

Andrew Marblemarble.onlandrew@willows.ai June 21, 2026

There was a time not too long ago when using Linux entailed some professional risk1. First there was compatibility: you may not have been able to render a Word document or Power Point correctly, and you might have had to trust Open Office’s export capability to render docs the way you wanted. There might have been specialty file formats you couldn’t easily view and so couldn’t collaborate. And second, the software ecosystem was just worse generally. There were lots of half-build open-source projects trying to achieve the functionality of mainstream software, but they always had rough edges. I, embarrassingly, stayed on Windows until I left academia over Matlab.

Nowadays I think this issue has largely disappeared. Most productivity software has a web-app, Linux is more mature, open-source software is better. I’m sure that there are all sorts of application specific software (CAD?) that still require a Windows machine, but the gap is much narrower and Linux + open source generally aren’t the “sacrifice” they once were generally.