There is minimal downside to switching to open models Andrew Marble marble.onl [email protected] June 21, 2026 There was a time not too long ago when using Linux entailed some professional risk 1 . First there was compatibility: you may not have been able to render a Word document or PowerPoint 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.…