Hey I’m working on starting my own business using OSS and this series has been great. Love that you take a business centric and realistic approach rather than focusing solely on the tech. Keep it up!
Based on my personal experience I'd advise against running your own mail server unless you are fairly knowledgeable and ready to keep a constant eye on it. Mail has gotten a lot more complex over the years, thanks mostly to spammers, and probably will get even more so. Even if mail-in-a-box is super easy to set up you should know how mail works in case something breaks, as downtime in mail for a business is, I think, potentially more problematic than downtime on most other systems.
Great video! I'm not sure if anyone mentioned it, but you have an error in the annual cost for the server on the open source. The annual cost (at the end of the video) should be $1600/12 = 133.33 which is the same as the value on the closed source side.
Thank you for your videos in this series. I'm sorry I gave you a hard time on the Netmaker video calling out a silly technical bit. I hope to build a business with open source software as a core part of the business model, and your videos have driven my curiosity, excitement and learning about OSS I haven't seen before. I'm excited for the shirt and mug merch I ordered to use while on VC at my proprietary software job. This is an important video, as there are lots of sources claiming OSS is more expensive in the long run, which I believe don't set a fair stage for comparison as this video tries hard to do. I'd like to see a video about tech "safety" for a business venture and how best-practices can save more $$$ than picking the "right" tool.
1. Never worry about giving me a hard time. I'm humbled on a daily basis, and that's good for me ;-). 2. Super excited you ordered some stuff. Please, seriously, let me know what you think. i want feedback, so I can make it better over time, just like my content.
The greatest advantage is that in the end your data will be your data, no one will be able to steal it unless your the weak link, no one will be able to sell your tracking and analytics and build a profile on your data, after you pay them a premium. you wont be squeezed for more money later down the line, because your now locked in to their echo system.
Running open source is fine aslong as you backup lol, you can simply just restore from backup (especially if it's a VM), and register and post on forums on how to backup and restore
Just wondering on the server cost line - why is the annual amount different per side? If you're breaking that down over a 5 year period on both sides, shouldn't the cost be equal on the closed source ( right ) side? I see that it's not a huge difference in cost - really, but it looks like the open source side has the server code divided by 5 while the closed source side has it divide by 12.
Bugged me too. I figure it's an error, guessing he was going for monthly cost over a year at one point and changed his mind but forgot to update the formula.
Great catch! Again, in the favor of Open Source, but I like to be as accurate as I can. I have made the correction and put it in its correct form on the show notes. Thank you.
The VMWare component looks like the VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit (from the cost). This does not give you the full capabilities of VCenter. You do not get some features that you get with Proxmox.
Good to know. It's hard for me to know which packages to pick to get the closest comparison, but in this case sounds like it would fall in the favor of open source, right?
In a nutshell it's waaaay cheaper than closed source & you can modify it if you wished to improve on it (Please contribute back to the source if you do so) & if you pay for it, you'll be benefitted from it immensely
I'll try to keep adding on. I want to make this a public spread sheet, but kind of want to make sure it isn't a dumping ground. I'm trying to think of a way that people can add their costs / ideas, but at the same time have a few folks available to monitor it so it doesn't get spammed up. I'm working on it.
Are you sure that a Dell R730XD with CPU's, RAM & 32TB of SSD storage (03:58 in the video) can be had for $1600? Can't find that or anything close to that price ...
I bought the server and drives separately. It took a lot of time to find the right deals on the drives, but I did find Toshiba 8 TB drives for $149 early this year. Now I see them for $170 US. Did I say SSD storage? I'm sure that was a slip of the tongue. That is most definitely 3.5" spinning HDD, not SSD. I do have a decent amount of SSD, but not for that price.
Redo your list... It's all wrong! Just kidding... I would change a few things, but purely out of personal preference... I wouldn't do VPS, I would just get a static IP wherever I have my server and host email on Zentyal there... I wouldn't pay for a VPN, pfsense provides that functionality... I would put pfsense on physically separate hardware, because you don't what to upgrade your hypervisor and then your internet goes off... I would go for XCP-ng and Xen Orchestrator with offsite S3 backups or backups to a local NAS depending on your loathing of cloud (I don't use LXC just mostly docker and cloud-init for quick linux VMs). Almost the same on the closed source side. I would either use Google Workspaces or Exchange Online or Business Basic license, not both Microsoft and Google (To be honest, I would rather go with Zoho) Same thing, wouldn't subscribe to a VPN service either, the Cisco Firepower can do that - Or I would rather go FortiGate or Sophos (Sophos has less complex licensing) If you are adamant to have a VPN service not managed on the firewall, then I would suggest using CloudFlare ZTNA, it is free for upto 50 users plus they allow you to expose services to the internet via their proxy, without having any port forwards in place... opinion over... don't hate me... I actually wanted to start a tech youtube channel, I had a few topics lined up and they would end up having a working business model (Oracle Free Tier, Docker, Traefik, Crowdsec, InvoiceNinja, Zabbix, Grafana, WikiJS, Wordpress, Snipe-IT etc.) ... then I saw your video series...
Let me know what software you'd like to see added, maybe it will fit what I'm trying to do. Looking at accounting, HR, and other software now as well. Trying to learn.
@@AwesomeOpenSource I would need to go through your series and just check what you have and I can make recommendations. I also want to say thank you for what you are doing and contributing to the community! I need to also start contributing, I felt bad about my comment, I would prefer being constructive and I feel that my comment might not come across as constructive.
I believe your windows server licensing is inaccurate for on premise deployment. Windows server licenses are perpetual, although you can go the software assurance / annualized cost route if you wish, and if you purchase at the beginning of a major release, you get 10 years of security updates. You do pay for windows server based on cpu cores now. Your server would require 24 cores worth of licensing. The most expensive option, Windows Server 2022 Datacenter with 24 cores is going for $7,199. This gets you Windows Server Hyper-V and unlimited Windows Server 2022 VMs. You will require User Client Access Licenses for every distinct user that directly accesses one of the Windows VMs. 6 users would be 6 licenses and they could access all the VMs. User CALs are about $65 per user. A Windows Server 2022 Std license gets you two Windows instances. This means one instance installs on bare metal, one can be a VM. Each subsequent license will get you two more Windows VMs. A Windows Server 2022 Std license with 24 cores is $1,299. You can run an unlimited number of Linux VMs on Hyper-V as they wouldn't count for licensing. For 6 Windows VMs that would require 4 Windows Server 2022 Std licenses (1 license = 1 bare metal + 1 VM and 3 licenses = 2 VMs each for 6 more VMs = 7 VMs total) 4 * $1,299 = $5,196 for potentially 10 years. You will still need the User CALS. These prices were what I could find with a quick search but are more than I actually paid when bundling the licenses with a new server purchase. I think you VMWare year over year pricing may be off as well but I'm not familiar with their new subscription only pricing model. I do believe the new VMWare licenses are close the optional Proxmox licensing costs.
Great info, and thank you. I want to make sure I'm following this correctly. You believe I should take $ 6300 and divide that by 10 (for the 10 years) to be more accurate on Windows licensing?
I just dropped G:Suite or whatever they're calling it this year in favor of Zoho for a couple domains I have and it's only $12/user/year for their cheapest email plan... not as many features as mail-in-a-box, but good pricing and easy to setup and maintain. If you only have one domain, and don't need IMAP/SMTP access... they have a free plan for 5 users.
Very good to know. If it gets the job done for you, then definitely use what works. If you find yourself looking for another option in the future, you know there's some great open source options out there.
You won't be able to run actual VMs since it's already a VPS and as far as I know they don't support nested virtualization (most providers don't), so it will depend on whether you can live with LXC instead of virtual machines.
@@ToniCorvera I just checked, it says KVM Virtualization, but it may refer to the instance instead of allowing VM nesting as you said, I will ask. Not that I need virtualization, I need containers onyl.
@@DamjanDimitrioski truth be told, where containers can do the job I very much prefer them over full virtualization, let alone nested virtualization. And Proxmox is quite good at managing them.
Great questions. I have not tried to run a Hypervisor in SSDNodes, but yes given their server resources, you could run multiple applications in Docker or LXC / LXD and get a ton out of those servers. I ran over 30 docker applications in mine at one point, and it still have plenty of room for more.
I love this, this genuinely is a decision a lot of SME would have to think about and apply so I love the practical aspect of this situation. I hope this evolves into a whole series!
It is already a series...and I will keep covering the tally as we move forward. I have this set as a playlist in my channel, if you haven't seen the videos so far.
the short answer, these days there is no truly close sourced. you have open and mixed, cut out all the open source code and replace it with proprietary and you'll need a to hire an extra team of developers, the main benefit you will get from open source is true privacy. any code you dont need or like you can fork and replace and even share the improvements upstream.
I would recommend thinking about your IT business from a managed service perspective, and then providing that service with whatever you want. Customers don't generally need to know the details, it will just make them nervous. Proxmox makes plenty of sense for a hypervisor, I'd personally rather use that than hyperv. pfSense / Netgate is a no brainier option for a firewall, you get a ton of power for the money and without the hassles of piecemeal licensing of other solutions. Netgate is a good fit up to around 10Gbe, or if the customer wants to fork out serious cash for Palo Alto. Netmaker or plain wireguard are no brainers for a vpn solution, they are just simply better solutions than much of the competition. These things are tools that any IT company can deploy without thinking about it much, and it's not really a matter of pricing, but rather using the best tools for the job. If only it were that simple. The unfortunate reality is that most businesses rely on windows only software, so you're not touching the desktop without some serious effort and thought. The moment any software they use requires a windows server, like say quickbooks or any number of line of business applications, you're going to build a windows vm and then the licensing costs of things like proxmox and zentyal become additions, not comparisons, since AD and Hyperv come with your windows license. So it's more a question of if these tools are things you would rather use regardless of cost. The real challenge, and what Linux actually needs, are integrators that target specific market verticals with end to end linux solutions that include the desktop. This is fundamentally what keeps Linux from dominating on the desktop (and by extension, small/medium business servers). I honestly think that this is something that is a mostly untapped frontier. While a lot of line of business software is turning into web applications, many industries still require local infrastructure, and the bring your own device architecture is a recipe for an endless unmanaged nightmare. Imagine instead an all in one solution for say, dental practices that would be a drop in solution for both desktop and server including everything doctors need to run their business from xrays to practice management without all the shit and complexity that windows necessarily brings with it. The controlability of the whole Linux environment could in theory be a big win for many businesses that just want to get to work. Doing so would require close partnerships with other industry vendors though, or a lot of development to make new solutions that can compete head on. Every industry relies on various commercial software, specialty hardware, and so on, and it's almost all windows. This is the real roadblock to Linux adoption. It's a constant pet peive of mine that the OSS community seems to think reinventing the desktop over and over again will eventually result in mass-adoption. It won't.
Two other products any IT company can look at finding a place for would be TrueNAS, and 3CX. TrueNAS is a great fit for those very small clients that need local data storage, but would balk at the price of a proper server. It gets you a proper ZFS deployment and basic hypervisor capabilities if you need to run a windows server vm on it. I have it at several clients and use zfs send over ssh and wireguard to replicate the data set back to my own servers, I charge for this offsite backup service of course. I have snapshotting enabled on the TrueNAS, which was a big win almost immediately for one client as just a week after I deployed it they somehow thought that the files in their home directory were "extra" and deleted them XD. I reverted it to a snapshot and she was back up and running after just a 10 min phonecall. 3CX itself is not open source. But it runs on debian, so that's better than nothing. It's a high feature, low cost PBX that can be hosted by you in the cloud or on prem. Easy to make a business on this since so many phone systems suck. You can save them money while improving their system. If you want something fully open source, FreePBX is worth looking at, I've not done that yet.
I should also say that I did a deep dive on synology and was not very impressed. The gui is very pretty but under the hood there's a lot of weird choices, and honestly I don't think btrfs is ready for prime time. Synology doesn't actually use btrfs's raid features, probably because it's parity raid is unstable. So they use MD instead, but that breaks btr's self healing features, so they basically made a hack to get that to work somehow. SMB multichannel doesn't work so if you are trying to get high single channel performance over 10GB then you'll be disappointed. At the end of the day none of these NAS solutions I think are appropriate past cheap basic hardware. I had a client recently that spent about 80k on a full flash synology server without consulting me, I spent the next month digging deep into it to see if I could get samba to perform well. I left quite unimpressed. They even have sqrews all over the inside of it too so it's quite inadequate for a datacenter environment as well where you may want to hot swap something on the inside without the risk of dropping a sqrew into it. So past cheap basic equipment, just buy a conventional server, and use a stock linux distro if you care about performance imo.
"It's a constant pet peive of mine that the OSS community seems to think reinventing the desktop over and over again will eventually result in mass-adoption. It won't" 👏👏
Love the thoughts and considerations. I'll be covering TrueNAS for this series soon as well. It's a killer system for certain. As for the other thoughts, I say do what works best for you as a business, and make sure your clients' needs are met. That's what will make you successful.
Props for the "The Last Dragon" reference! As for the rest, the OSS community does a ton to show genuine creativity, ingenuity, and thoughtfulness in what they bring to the table. Maybe they don't need to re-invent the Desktop, but if they didn't we'd all still be using DOS-shell.
Hey I’m working on starting my own business using OSS and this series has been great. Love that you take a business centric and realistic approach rather than focusing solely on the tech. Keep it up!
Thank you. I'm trying. I know I'll miss things, but i also know my viewers will keep me honest and let me know when I do. Best to you my friend.
Based on my personal experience I'd advise against running your own mail server unless you are fairly knowledgeable and ready to keep a constant eye on it.
Mail has gotten a lot more complex over the years, thanks mostly to spammers, and probably will get even more so. Even if mail-in-a-box is super easy to set up you should know how mail works in case something breaks, as downtime in mail for a business is, I think, potentially more problematic than downtime on most other systems.
Indeed, it's valuable to know what all the pieces do, and to understand how to recover a system quickly should something happen. Great tip!
If you run your own mail server Def make sure you have a static business ip
Great video! I'm not sure if anyone mentioned it, but you have an error in the annual cost for the server on the open source. The annual cost (at the end of the video) should be $1600/12 = 133.33 which is the same as the value on the closed source side.
They have, and while I can't fix it in the video, I did fix it on the spreadsheet linked in the description on my show notes.
You're a credit to the community. Keep it up homie.
Thanks, will do!
Thank you for your videos in this series. I'm sorry I gave you a hard time on the Netmaker video calling out a silly technical bit. I hope to build a business with open source software as a core part of the business model, and your videos have driven my curiosity, excitement and learning about OSS I haven't seen before. I'm excited for the shirt and mug merch I ordered to use while on VC at my proprietary software job. This is an important video, as there are lots of sources claiming OSS is more expensive in the long run, which I believe don't set a fair stage for comparison as this video tries hard to do. I'd like to see a video about tech "safety" for a business venture and how best-practices can save more $$$ than picking the "right" tool.
1. Never worry about giving me a hard time. I'm humbled on a daily basis, and that's good for me ;-). 2. Super excited you ordered some stuff. Please, seriously, let me know what you think. i want feedback, so I can make it better over time, just like my content.
this is an awesome idea, will slowly work through the projects/vids here
Awesome! Let me know how it goes and how you solve these problems.
Thus intro jingle had some bad ali g sound to it. love it. Great video breakdown!
Ali G! woooo!
Instead of Proxmox you could use XCP-NG which I believe would be cheaper and use less Server Resources
I've looked at XCP-NG, and want to try it eventually, but I believe it still lacks the LXC / LXD support that Proxmox has.
The greatest advantage is that in the end your data will be your data, no one will be able to steal it unless your the weak link, no one will be able to sell your tracking and analytics and build a profile on your data, after you pay them a premium. you wont be squeezed for more money later down the line, because your now locked in to their echo system.
Exactly
thanks for posting these video...i luv ur contents...keep up this work....
Thank you so much!
Running open source is fine aslong as you backup lol, you can simply just restore from backup (especially if it's a VM), and register and post on forums on how to backup and restore
Absolutely. Backups and Disaster recovery are a huge part of self-hosting anything, open source or not.
The OCD in me will never let me sleep until the formula in K4 is corrected to calculate for 5 years not 12.
Sorry about that. I'll try and fix it.
Just wondering on the server cost line - why is the annual amount different per side? If you're breaking that down over a 5 year period on both sides, shouldn't the cost be equal on the closed source ( right ) side?
I see that it's not a huge difference in cost - really, but it looks like the open source side has the server code divided by 5 while the closed source side has it divide by 12.
Bugged me too. I figure it's an error, guessing he was going for monthly cost over a year at one point and changed his mind but forgot to update the formula.
Great catch! Again, in the favor of Open Source, but I like to be as accurate as I can. I have made the correction and put it in its correct form on the show notes. Thank you.
The VMWare component looks like the VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit (from the cost). This does not give you the full capabilities of VCenter. You do not get some features that you get with Proxmox.
Good to know. It's hard for me to know which packages to pick to get the closest comparison, but in this case sounds like it would fall in the favor of open source, right?
@@AwesomeOpenSource
Yes
In a nutshell it's waaaay cheaper than closed source & you can modify it if you wished to improve on it
(Please contribute back to the source if you do so)
& if you pay for it, you'll be benefitted from it immensely
100%
Also try adding intangible costs when things go down (ofc itll be different from business to business) but yeah complexity does vary.
I'll try to keep adding on. I want to make this a public spread sheet, but kind of want to make sure it isn't a dumping ground. I'm trying to think of a way that people can add their costs / ideas, but at the same time have a few folks available to monitor it so it doesn't get spammed up. I'm working on it.
Can you add a link to the Windows pricing calculator to the show notes?
Sure, let me find it, and I'll add it. Here it is for you though wintelguy.com/windows-server-licensing-calc.pl
Some businesses want to vendor support, for specific services and vendors to be relied upon for specific issues.
Vendor support is often one of the ways Open Source makes revenue to support the continued development of the product, so it's a great option.
Are you sure that a Dell R730XD with CPU's, RAM & 32TB of SSD storage (03:58 in the video) can be had for $1600?
Can't find that or anything close to that price ...
I bought the server and drives separately. It took a lot of time to find the right deals on the drives, but I did find Toshiba 8 TB drives for $149 early this year. Now I see them for $170 US. Did I say SSD storage? I'm sure that was a slip of the tongue. That is most definitely 3.5" spinning HDD, not SSD. I do have a decent amount of SSD, but not for that price.
@@AwesomeOpenSource Thank you for the reply. Put my mind at rest about SSD pricing ....
Redo your list... It's all wrong!
Just kidding... I would change a few things, but purely out of personal preference...
I wouldn't do VPS, I would just get a static IP wherever I have my server and host email on Zentyal there...
I wouldn't pay for a VPN, pfsense provides that functionality...
I would put pfsense on physically separate hardware, because you don't what to upgrade your hypervisor and then your internet goes off...
I would go for XCP-ng and Xen Orchestrator with offsite S3 backups or backups to a local NAS depending on your loathing of cloud (I don't use LXC just mostly docker and cloud-init for quick linux VMs).
Almost the same on the closed source side.
I would either use Google Workspaces or Exchange Online or Business Basic license, not both Microsoft and Google (To be honest, I would rather go with Zoho)
Same thing, wouldn't subscribe to a VPN service either, the Cisco Firepower can do that - Or I would rather go FortiGate or Sophos (Sophos has less complex licensing)
If you are adamant to have a VPN service not managed on the firewall, then I would suggest using CloudFlare ZTNA, it is free for upto 50 users plus they allow you to expose services to the internet via their proxy, without having any port forwards in place...
opinion over... don't hate me...
I actually wanted to start a tech youtube channel, I had a few topics lined up and they would end up having a working business model (Oracle Free Tier, Docker, Traefik, Crowdsec, InvoiceNinja, Zabbix, Grafana, WikiJS, Wordpress, Snipe-IT etc.) ... then I saw your video series...
Let me know what software you'd like to see added, maybe it will fit what I'm trying to do. Looking at accounting, HR, and other software now as well. Trying to learn.
@@AwesomeOpenSource I would need to go through your series and just check what you have and I can make recommendations.
I also want to say thank you for what you are doing and contributing to the community! I need to also start contributing, I felt bad about my comment, I would prefer being constructive and I feel that my comment might not come across as constructive.
I believe your windows server licensing is inaccurate for on premise deployment. Windows server licenses are perpetual, although you can go the software assurance / annualized cost route if you wish, and if you purchase at the beginning of a major release, you get 10 years of security updates. You do pay for windows server based on cpu cores now. Your server would require 24 cores worth of licensing. The most expensive option, Windows Server 2022 Datacenter with 24 cores is going for $7,199. This gets you Windows Server Hyper-V and unlimited Windows Server 2022 VMs. You will require User Client Access Licenses for every distinct user that directly accesses one of the Windows VMs. 6 users would be 6 licenses and they could access all the VMs. User CALs are about $65 per user. A Windows Server 2022 Std license gets you two Windows instances. This means one instance installs on bare metal, one can be a VM. Each subsequent license will get you two more Windows VMs. A Windows Server 2022 Std license with 24 cores is $1,299. You can run an unlimited number of Linux VMs on Hyper-V as they wouldn't count for licensing. For 6 Windows VMs that would require 4 Windows Server 2022 Std licenses (1 license = 1 bare metal + 1 VM and 3 licenses = 2 VMs each for 6 more VMs = 7 VMs total) 4 * $1,299 = $5,196 for potentially 10 years. You will still need the User CALS. These prices were what I could find with a quick search but are more than I actually paid when bundling the licenses with a new server purchase. I think you VMWare year over year pricing may be off as well but I'm not familiar with their new subscription only pricing model. I do believe the new VMWare licenses are close the optional Proxmox licensing costs.
Great info, and thank you. I want to make sure I'm following this correctly. You believe I should take $ 6300 and divide that by 10 (for the 10 years) to be more accurate on Windows licensing?
I just dropped G:Suite or whatever they're calling it this year in favor of Zoho for a couple domains I have and it's only $12/user/year for their cheapest email plan... not as many features as mail-in-a-box, but good pricing and easy to setup and maintain. If you only have one domain, and don't need IMAP/SMTP access... they have a free plan for 5 users.
Very good to know. If it gets the job done for you, then definitely use what works. If you find yourself looking for another option in the future, you know there's some great open source options out there.
What about ssdnodes, they offer >50 gb ram for around 120$, per year so can it be used for the VM's instead?
You won't be able to run actual VMs since it's already a VPS and as far as I know they don't support nested virtualization (most providers don't), so it will depend on whether you can live with LXC instead of virtual machines.
@@ToniCorvera I just checked, it says KVM Virtualization, but it may refer to the instance instead of allowing VM nesting as you said, I will ask.
Not that I need virtualization, I need containers onyl.
@@DamjanDimitrioski truth be told, where containers can do the job I very much prefer them over full virtualization, let alone nested virtualization. And Proxmox is quite good at managing them.
Great questions. I have not tried to run a Hypervisor in SSDNodes, but yes given their server resources, you could run multiple applications in Docker or LXC / LXD and get a ton out of those servers. I ran over 30 docker applications in mine at one point, and it still have plenty of room for more.
I love this, this genuinely is a decision a lot of SME would have to think about and apply so I love the practical aspect of this situation. I hope this evolves into a whole series!
It is already a series...and I will keep covering the tally as we move forward. I have this set as a playlist in my channel, if you haven't seen the videos so far.
@@AwesomeOpenSource Ooh Ill definitely check it out then, thanks!
the short answer, these days there is no truly close sourced. you have open and mixed, cut out all the open source code and replace it with proprietary and you'll need a to hire an extra team of developers, the main benefit you will get from open source is true privacy. any code you dont need or like you can fork and replace and even share the improvements upstream.
There is some amazing flexibiility in the open source options for certain!
I would recommend thinking about your IT business from a managed service perspective, and then providing that service with whatever you want. Customers don't generally need to know the details, it will just make them nervous. Proxmox makes plenty of sense for a hypervisor, I'd personally rather use that than hyperv. pfSense / Netgate is a no brainier option for a firewall, you get a ton of power for the money and without the hassles of piecemeal licensing of other solutions. Netgate is a good fit up to around 10Gbe, or if the customer wants to fork out serious cash for Palo Alto. Netmaker or plain wireguard are no brainers for a vpn solution, they are just simply better solutions than much of the competition. These things are tools that any IT company can deploy without thinking about it much, and it's not really a matter of pricing, but rather using the best tools for the job.
If only it were that simple. The unfortunate reality is that most businesses rely on windows only software, so you're not touching the desktop without some serious effort and thought. The moment any software they use requires a windows server, like say quickbooks or any number of line of business applications, you're going to build a windows vm and then the licensing costs of things like proxmox and zentyal become additions, not comparisons, since AD and Hyperv come with your windows license. So it's more a question of if these tools are things you would rather use regardless of cost.
The real challenge, and what Linux actually needs, are integrators that target specific market verticals with end to end linux solutions that include the desktop. This is fundamentally what keeps Linux from dominating on the desktop (and by extension, small/medium business servers). I honestly think that this is something that is a mostly untapped frontier. While a lot of line of business software is turning into web applications, many industries still require local infrastructure, and the bring your own device architecture is a recipe for an endless unmanaged nightmare. Imagine instead an all in one solution for say, dental practices that would be a drop in solution for both desktop and server including everything doctors need to run their business from xrays to practice management without all the shit and complexity that windows necessarily brings with it. The controlability of the whole Linux environment could in theory be a big win for many businesses that just want to get to work. Doing so would require close partnerships with other industry vendors though, or a lot of development to make new solutions that can compete head on.
Every industry relies on various commercial software, specialty hardware, and so on, and it's almost all windows. This is the real roadblock to Linux adoption. It's a constant pet peive of mine that the OSS community seems to think reinventing the desktop over and over again will eventually result in mass-adoption. It won't.
Two other products any IT company can look at finding a place for would be TrueNAS, and 3CX. TrueNAS is a great fit for those very small clients that need local data storage, but would balk at the price of a proper server. It gets you a proper ZFS deployment and basic hypervisor capabilities if you need to run a windows server vm on it. I have it at several clients and use zfs send over ssh and wireguard to replicate the data set back to my own servers, I charge for this offsite backup service of course. I have snapshotting enabled on the TrueNAS, which was a big win almost immediately for one client as just a week after I deployed it they somehow thought that the files in their home directory were "extra" and deleted them XD. I reverted it to a snapshot and she was back up and running after just a 10 min phonecall.
3CX itself is not open source. But it runs on debian, so that's better than nothing. It's a high feature, low cost PBX that can be hosted by you in the cloud or on prem. Easy to make a business on this since so many phone systems suck. You can save them money while improving their system. If you want something fully open source, FreePBX is worth looking at, I've not done that yet.
I should also say that I did a deep dive on synology and was not very impressed. The gui is very pretty but under the hood there's a lot of weird choices, and honestly I don't think btrfs is ready for prime time. Synology doesn't actually use btrfs's raid features, probably because it's parity raid is unstable. So they use MD instead, but that breaks btr's self healing features, so they basically made a hack to get that to work somehow. SMB multichannel doesn't work so if you are trying to get high single channel performance over 10GB then you'll be disappointed. At the end of the day none of these NAS solutions I think are appropriate past cheap basic hardware. I had a client recently that spent about 80k on a full flash synology server without consulting me, I spent the next month digging deep into it to see if I could get samba to perform well. I left quite unimpressed. They even have sqrews all over the inside of it too so it's quite inadequate for a datacenter environment as well where you may want to hot swap something on the inside without the risk of dropping a sqrew into it. So past cheap basic equipment, just buy a conventional server, and use a stock linux distro if you care about performance imo.
"It's a constant pet peive of mine that the OSS community seems to think reinventing the desktop over and over again will eventually result in mass-adoption. It won't"
👏👏
Love the thoughts and considerations. I'll be covering TrueNAS for this series soon as well. It's a killer system for certain. As for the other thoughts, I say do what works best for you as a business, and make sure your clients' needs are met. That's what will make you successful.
Props for the "The Last Dragon" reference! As for the rest, the OSS community does a ton to show genuine creativity, ingenuity, and thoughtfulness in what they bring to the table. Maybe they don't need to re-invent the Desktop, but if they didn't we'd all still be using DOS-shell.