In early 2026 I migrated a logistics and transport company in Bergamo, Italy from a fully proprietary setup to Linux and open source. Five workstations, five employees, zero technical background on their side. Here is what we did, what happened, and what I learned.
The starting point
The company was running Windows on every workstation, Microsoft Office for documents, a third-party antivirus renewed annually, and an external IT technician called in every time something broke. They had no internal IT knowledge and no interest in acquiring any. They just wanted things to work.
Their main pain points were slow machines, frequent crashes after Windows updates, and a recurring bill that kept growing without any visible improvement.
What we installed
I replaced everything with a fully open source stack:
- Kubuntu as the operating system on all five workstations
- LibreOffice in place of Microsoft Office
- Thunderbird for email
- Nextcloud for file sharing and internal document management, self-hosted on a server in Italy
- Mattermost for internal team communication
- pfSense as the network firewall
- WireGuard for VPN access
- Automated encrypted backups running nightly
Total recurring licence cost after migration: zero.
The migration process
The full migration took approximately one week. I configured everything on a test machine first, validated all workflows with the team, then rolled out workstation by workstation during off-hours to avoid interruptions.
The biggest challenge was not technical. It was psychological. People are used to what they know. I spent as much time sitting with each employee and showing them that LibreOffice opens their Word files and Nextcloud works like Google Drive as I did on the actual technical setup.
After three days they stopped asking about Windows.
Results after six months
Six months in, the company has not called me for a single ordinary technical issue. The machines are faster. Updates do not break anything. There have been zero security incidents.
The most concrete result: each employee recovered roughly one hour per day that was previously lost to slowdowns, crashes and waiting for the external technician. On five people that is five hours a day returned to productive work.
Licence costs are gone. The infrastructure belongs to them, not to a vendor.
Why this matters beyond one company
Most Italian SMEs are in the same situation. They pay recurring fees for software they do not own, store data on foreign servers subject to the US Cloud Act, and depend on vendors who can change the rules at any time.
Linux and open source infrastructure is not experimental. It is mature, stable, and ready for business use. The barrier is not technical. It is awareness.
I wrote the Zerolock Manifesto (https://zerolock.org) on exactly this topic. If you are working on similar migrations or have questions about the stack, I am happy to discuss in the comments.
Top comments (2)
Cool post. I'm in a very familiar situation. I work for a small company (+/-10 employees) and as a hobby i also am responsible for everything IT related there. I've been using linux already private since a couple of years. This year one of the employees had a fatal hardware pc problem which made him without pc overnight. We still had some spare older laptops but these were older laptops with only 8 gb ram. Since i had been dreaming already of one day migrating everything away from microsoft, i had been planning on replacement software and made a pick list in the past. However, now in my opinion i had the perfect opportunity to give a ram-friendly linux distro a try. If it would not work, i could still set up a windows pc.
I decided to go for it, installed kubuntu lts with luks, libreoffice, teams via pwa and so on. Unfortunately, i could not be present the next day so i was really afraid of how it would turn out. Turns out they really liked the operating system and had been working problem free almost immediately without any prior linux experience. That already tells how much linux has matured.
Since than i've been steadily expanding the fleet so now almost half of the employees are mainly microsoft free. Again, with very limited assitance needed on the OS. Nextcloud and nextcloud talk have been introduced for file sharing and internal messages/video calls. Teltonika network equipment has been introduced and turned out much better than expected.
Since you seem to be using very familiar modus operandis, i'll be keeping an eye on your pages. if you want to get in touch, do not hesitate to contact me!
Thanks Michael, this is exactly the kind of story I enjoy reading. The overnight hardware failure as an unexpected entry point for a Linux migration happens more often than people think, and you handled it perfectly. The fact that they adapted without prior Linux experience and with minimal assistance says everything about where the desktop experience is today.
Kubuntu with LUKS, Nextcloud, Teams via PWA, we are definitely working from the same playbook. Keep expanding that fleet.
Happy to compare notes anytime, feel free to reach out directly.