@mdbekhit Dsh sounds a lot like Ansible. I've never heard of Cockpit, I'll have look. Thanks!

@popey book price, there's no mentioning of any sort of discounts on the website.

@Gina @popey Everything is negotiable.

@sean @popey yeah but that's the thing. Sure a discount would be great, but many NGO's and SMBs don't have the time or energy to email a sales dept. They might not speak the language or even know that a discount is possible (and I still don't know). It takes 5 minutes to order a bunch of Msft stuff, and via Techsoup non-profits basically get everything Msft for free. Again, I just wish it would be a bit less cumbersome or expensive to choose #opensource.

@Gina @sean That feels like a cop-out. You can't complain online that stuff is too expensive if you don't make the absolute minimum effort to try to get it cheaper, surely?

@popey @sean Sure, but if we're talking about persuading organisations to use more opensource than I prefer to see less hurdles than it takes to choose closedsource software.

@Gina @sean Elephant in the room. We're multiple orders of magnitude smaller than Msft, and it turns out, it costs money to build and host open source software. Someone, somewhere needs to pay.

@popey @sean Absolutely, I agree. It's a hard balance to find and it's impossible to please everyone. On the other hand, a discount program might reach a significant crowd which otherwise would have chosen a different solution.

@popey
Unfortunately that causes a snowball effect where Msft continues to grow because they get more business by offering a lower price. So how do we break the cycle?
@Gina @sean

@nebunez @popey @sean I would love to have a discussion about this. Speaking from the non-profit world, even though most NGO's feel uneasy about choosing GAFAM products, their discount programs are still too financially appealing and alternatives too unknown.

@Gina @popey Yes, but almost any product has a list price/catalog price, and a lower street price if you work through sales. Particularly if you're buying in bulk and you're a non-profit. That savings can be significant, so it may be worth the time and frustration of dealing with salespeople versus using a online storefront. I would recommend reaching out https://www.ubuntu.com/contact-us to Canonical and saying "Hi, I'm the admin for a non-profit with X seats and we'd like to use Landscape for system management. What can you do to work with us on pricing?" You might be pleasantly surprised with the results.

@fabian #RedHat offers Satellite for the enterprise and Spacewalk for free. I''ve looked at Spacewalk before and I believe it's only for RH derivative distro's such as Fedora and Centos. We've chosen to use Linux Mint.

I have no idea what SUSE offers. I know them least of all distro's and as they say in my native language; the unknown is unloved.

@fabian @Gina Re: Linux Mint, I feel like you might be setting yourself up for failure. It's a fine distro but it's not really "business oriented", and you will find few if any central management tools support it. Honestly, I think you should look at https://www.opensuse.org/ as it will have all the same features as SUSE Enterprise, including management and configuration tools and LTS-level lifecycles. SUSE's analog to Satellite is SUSE Manager, formerly based on Spacewalk, now evolved into https://www.uyuni-project.org/. You will also find that the YaST administration tool makes setting up common business-class services like LDAP/kerberos much more straight-forward.

@dirk What other solutions?

@Gina Solutions on other operating systems that are ready for businesses.

@dirk Do you mean Windows and MacOS or other Enterprise Linux distro's?

@Gina I rephrase:

In your opinion, which operating systems are ready for businesses?

What do you pay for those operating systems if you want to manage them centrally?

Or, what is the price for a central management solution for desktops you consider to be business ready?

@dirk Sorry Dirk but that's currently not relevant to me and I don't feel like looking it up.

@Gina You state that Ubuntu is more expensive to manage than Windows and you do not prove it.

As far as I can see Windows license cost without any management solution exceed the cost of Landscape.

@dirk Again, I'm not a msft admin. We've made an estimation at the time of Techsoup prices and stuff we needed (West-EU).

From what I remember, Get Genuine Win10 licenses were €8 (x 50 = €400). Standard Edition Win2016 server is 16 x €7 = €112. Then there was a mgmt tool (System Center Orchestrator? Again, not a Win sysadmin) that I remember being €12 per user (x 50 = €600). That add up to €1120, but I'm sure that's not all so let's say we double it. That's still a lot less than €7500.

@Gina Thank you!

@dirk if you do mean Windows go check out pricing on Techsoup, it's pretty cheap (for Msft). We have reasons to choose and support #Linux though, so we'd like to make that work and possibly contribute to solutions that enable its adoption businesswise. I honestly have no idea what MacOS management tools cost because I would never use MacOS.

@Gina So , Windows it is.

What is the cost of 50 Licenses for Windows and a management tool compared to a management tool for Ubuntu desktops?

@jordan31 Absolutely, but there's no guide or best practices blog about what tools to use. And to then see a nice shiney tool that could fix all your issues, but being very expensive makes this whole "let's smash large tech monopolies by making ethical choices" thing a bit frustrating. It shouldn't be this hard to not choose GAFAM.

@Gina Note this down. Be the first to write a blog about it. I can't relate to you on this level, but on smaller scale and different areas, I know struggle and annoyances.

@teclador what tools and distro's would you recommend?

@Gina For businesses I prefer stable distributions like Debian or RHEL/CentOS, private ArchLinux/Fedora. Config goes with Puppet; virtual machines with oVirt (the easy one) or Ganetti (more complicated); version control is fine with Git; a bunch of window managers can be used for different people ... There are tools for everything. Most of the cost is the time to figure out what you want to use and/or the time for your own tools in your preferred prog language. And you have great communities.