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.
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