this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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I work in a very large hospital. I left for 3 years and just came back. When I went to open a document at work, it opened in Libre Office. I was pretty surprised that they ditched Microsoft Office for Libre. Makes financial sense to me, especially because most of our use-cases are simply opening and reading a document or slideshow. But I was still surprised they made that switch, and I doubt half of the employees honestly even notice that much
Now, they still run Windows Desktops, and I doubt that would ever switch in my lifetime. So no linux for us. But still pleasantly surprised at the step forward
Do you really think many people would notice cinnamon?
Probably not honestly, but switching to Libre Office was probably relatively easy and saves way more than it cost to pay IT to get it running on the network.
But switching the desktop environment for the entire hospital system, I could see being costly (in labor costs). Plus, I'm not sure that the EMR (Epic) would play nice, or any of the other various critical programs they use. Definitely a much different (and probably difficult) task to pull off smoothly, compared to switching Office for Libre
Epic is developing Hyperspace for Mac, as well as “standalone” (access Hyperspace in a web browser). Plus many hospitals use Citrix virtualization, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Linux is theoretically possible (though unlikely due to jankiness).
We use Citrix, and that's where my knowledge really lacks (networking, in general). I feel like it could absolutely be done, but the "jankiness" of every program trying to operate smoothly, seems like a large hurdle (at least to my unknowledgable self). I just can't see a large hospital like mine, even trying to test-run something that may cause them more headaches than they already are used to. They have enough issues navigating/operating their current systems, as is lol. You can (almost literally) see the devide between admin expectations vs. practicality.
They're barely interested in spending money on "staff retention", let alone any software/networking "maybe's". They seem to lack the foresight for "long-term" gains, vs the "short-term". Color me surprised
I could see them asking for unreasonable function, because they don't understand. And then blaming IT for any hiccup.
And I don't feel like a web-based Hyperspace would be entirely viable, as we already have protocols for if/when the internet or network goes down. There are computers throughout the hospital that are specifically utilized for any "network downtime". Maybe they could use satellite or something as a "backup network-generator", but I'm too unknowledgable to understand how that would work or if it would even be viable. I honestly don't fully understand how the "downtime computers" operate, so that doctors' orders can still be made... maybe they already use satellite for those? I have no idea
But definitely doesn't seem like a "tomatoes/tomatas" situation to me, when comparing going full linux vs switching to Libre. I was just happy to see any kind of sensibility from them on the subject
https://www.kasmweb.com/
It's a container streaming platform. So it can replace RDP, remoteapps, Citrix and potentially Hyperspace (if it runs in Wine). Plus it's open source or can be paid for if you need support and hosting.
You get a free Ubuntu container to mess around for a few minutes, it's rather snappy for a VNC backend.