That deeply depends on the company and the certifications you’d acquired along the way. Some companies I worked at required an ever-escalating number of MS certs. For us, it’s a bit different though.

I always say that it’s easy to train someone in tech if they’ve got that mindset, but it’s damn near impossible to train someone to be good with people. We pride ourselves on being good people first so we generally don’t hire outside of other people we’ve worked with in the past.

Thanks!

The main office is in Calgary, but we have branches in Halifax and Vancouver as well. We’re looking to acquire a branch manager for Vancouver, or a sole-prop or MSP in Medicine Hat or basically anywhere else in Canada that would like an easier job and shares in an actually good company / co-op. Heck, a brilliant sales person would also be awesome.

Yeah, I was sort of taken aback at the level of open hostility here. I thought Linux users were pretty happy with getting the OS out there.

Anyway, I’ll check out Zorin! Much appreciated. Firefox and Thunderbird are already in use everywhere we can get people to ditch Chrome.

Explain to me how I’m making money off it, please.

Read my posts throughout this thread. As I said, the Linux stack is not a money maker, it’s more of a passion thing. Also, we’re not “selling it,” it’s something to outfit soon-to-be-sidelined Windows 10 systems with. It will literally cost me more money and hours to keep them from filling a landfill than it would to just dump them. There is no profit motive. No company will sign with us because of this service and no company will leave us if we can’t provide it. Your entire premise is faulty.

I make the same per-machine monthly fee as an MSP no matter if the client runs Windows, Linux, or MacOS. The OS is a thing to be maintained by us, not sold. Hell, we provide hardware and software to clients at cost. We profit off nothing but our MRR. We’re very open and honest.

If someone really writing the name and use of software that may help users and having an MSP donate monthly to FOSS is bad, then I don’t know what to tell you - we’re fundamentally different people.

And yeah, if I ask a chef what an odd seasoning they use on a dish is and they get all huffy and say “I’M NOT TELLING YOU FOR FREE!” then they’re probably an ass.

Actually, I’m rather sure you’re missing the point. Explain to me how I’m making money off it, please.

Read my posts throughout this thread. As I said, the Linux stack is not exactly a money maker, it’s more of a passion thing. Also, we’re not “selling it,” it’s something to outfit soon-to-be-sidelined Windows 10 systems with. It will literally cost me more money and hours to keep them from filling a landfill than it would to just dump them. There is no profit motive. No company will join us because of this and no company will leave us if we can’t provide it. Your entire premise is faulty.

I make the same monthly fee as an MSP no matter if the client runs Windows, Linux, or MacOS. The OS is a thing to be maintained by us, not sold. Hell, we provide hardware and software to clients at cost. We profit off nothing but our MRR. We’re very open and honest.

If you really think that saying the name of software that may help users and having an MSP donate monthly to FOSS is bad, then I don’t know what to tell you - we’re fundamentally different people.

Nearly 11 years. We have 8 employees and 3 branches.

We have been around for nearly 11 years now and have had a few requests for something that isn’t Microsoft or Apple. We agree with the clients.

Yeah, I do. I love I.T. work and messing with computers. I have, in fact, stated that if the government paid 100% of my expenses and I didn’t need to work that I’d run computer literacy camps and still do I.T…

Already do! We support every project we use with roughly equivalent “license fees” to what we’d pay to non-FOSS.

OpenSuse

Oh neat, I didn’t know that this existed! Thank you very much! It seems like it would take the sting out of hand-configuring every workstation we deploy.

Yes which is why we have several clients already running our current stack that I outlined above. As I said, it’s not exactly a money maker, it’s more of a passion thing. Also, we’re not “selling it,” it’s something to outfit soon-to-be-sidelined Windows 10 systems with. It will literally cost me more money and hours to keep them from filling a landfill than it would to just dump them. There is no profit motive. No company will join us because of this and no company will leave us if we can’t provide it. Your premise is faulty.

And unfortunately I am also the only Linux user on staff so we are limited to my knowledge and what I can dig up.

Nope, I’ve never sold a printer in my life beyond what clients have asked us to buy and bring to them. Really, I thought this would just be a fun thread as we’ve already designed everything ourselves. But I should know better than to be a person on the internet… My bad.

Anyway, I run a medium-sized I.T. firm in Canada and designed the company to be as ethical as it could possibly be from the ground up.

• All employees have equal votes after their initial 3 months is up in any part of the company that they are engaged in. I can (and have) been outvoted.
• After employees are here long enough (a few years), they can purchase shares if they like.
• I am the lowest paid full-time employee at the company by design. I do not take dividends.
• We operate on a Matrix org chart meaning that the “boss” on every project changes based on who is best suited to lead it and who has experience in that area.
• We have it in our charter that there are never any outside shareholders allowed. If you leave the company, your shares are purchased by the company for current market value. This includes myself. This is why employees owning shares is a good idea; it becomes a retirement plan. Unlike most corporations, we don’t want solely financially invested shareholders as they’re in business to extract value. They are parasites.
• We have acquired other companies. We have never had to pay for one. Our procedures are so thorough and ticket counts so astronomically low compared with other I.T. companies (which are called MSPs) due to our subsystems and customizations that they literally give themselves to us.
• We are as environmentally conscious as we can be. We redo and donate old systems to nonprofits and schools where we can. The only waste we put out is utterly dead hardware - no forced upgrade cycle. Electricity bills also drop dramatically at clients we take over due to more efficient machine use.
• During COVID, we gave away over $500k in free support. I figured it was more important that our nonprofit clients stay open than we stay open.
• In nearly ten years, we’ve never had an employee leave, and never had a client leave (well, we had one restaurant client close during COVID, but I don’t count that).
• We have full benefits.
• We have zero interest in “infinite growth” as it’s not a functional model. We have turned down clients because they don’t “get” us and would be a headache for our staff.
• Our current goal is a 9-5 (not 8-5), four-day workweek for all staff.

I understand that not every business owner is “good.” I believe that with proper regulation, however, we can make them at least behave way, way the fuck better than they do now.

I’ve built this model out in hopes it will catch on. I feel that if most companies operated under it that society would be substantially better off. Certain aspects of this model are so important and such a step up from the norm that I don’t understand how they weren’t obvious to other owners. But… greed I guess. Greed hurts every system it’s in.

Also of interest, we don’t have an issue with The Peter Principle as you’re never forced to move out of a position of competence or interest. You’re not salary-limited simply because you don’t want to be a manager; in fact, there are no managers.

So more than anything, it’s your hostility that’s telling.

I appreciate it!

The monthly client fee remains the same regardless of if the clients are on Linux or on Windows. I assure you, we’re not winning new converts with Linux. We are avoiding e-waste and upcycling machines for free. Switching clients to Linux wouldn’t make us any money as we don’t bill for project fees. If anything it would make us less money because we’re not trying to sell new objects to the client and are signing ourselves up to train and deploy to them. Please explain to me how that isn’t a good thing and is anything other than positive for all involved?

I wasn’t looking for someone to design the entire implementation, just one or two comments saying something to the tune of “X distro is easier for newbies” or something. Were you under the impression that I was trying to get people on a Linux Community to come in and support carpet shop printers or something, or is this kind of weird, misaligned hostility just the general tone I should expect?

This might be the first time in human history anybody’s ever asked for money to talk about Linux to potential converts. (I kid!)

In all seriousness though, I’m just looking for a couple recommendations for improvement, not an implementation. We’d be implementing it ourselves, we just want to make sure that we give the easiest time possible to those coming over from Windows.