What kind of headaches are you having? I’ve been running two completely different machines in a cluster with a pi as a Qdevice to keep quorum and it’s been incredibly stable for years.

Ooh, I know this one! Here’s what I did to get it working and set so it survives a reboot:

1. In a terminal, run sudo arandr
2. Set all of the monitors to 1080p
3. Close arandr
4. Go to Settings > Display
5. Rearrange monitors in correct order if necessary
6. Set the each monitor to the correct resolution and frequency, applying the settings after each update
7. All monitors should now work, BUT they will not survive a reboot in Pop-OS 22, because the GDM3 login screen will NOT have this information, and will reset everything. So we must copy the pop-os monitors.xml file to the gdm3 config directory:

sudo cp ~/.config/monitors.xml /var/lib/gdm3/.config/

Note: You may need to do this as sudo -i

8. Reboot, and all 3 monitors should be loaded in the correct positions, at the correct resolution at the login screen

That is crazy. According to a comment on that article, most BIOS uses UTC (as does Linux, obviously), but Windows uses localtime for some reason, so it converts UTC to localtime after boot, then back to UTC when it needs to do little things like networking or TLS.

Hell, I can get a 30 year old HP LaserJet 4 printer working just fine on almost any version of Linux with the official HPLIP CLI software provided by (shockingly) HP, which was updated 2 months ago with support for over 50 new printers and the following OSes:

• LinuxMint 21.1
• MxLinux 21.3
• Elementary OS 7
• Ubuntu 22.10
• RHEL 8.6
• RHEL 8.7
• RHEL 9.1
• Fedora 37

I HATE HP and their printers (PC LOAD LETTER WTF FOR LIFE) but I will admit that this is impressive support.

And Windows is used on business PCs largely because of how manageable they are at scale.

… Linux being manageable at scale is kind of the reason why Linux is the standard for servers. Many enterprises run Linux workstation distros, and they can be managed at scale just fine, it’s just different tooling. You can deploy a Linux desktop OS with Ansible as easily as a Linux server.

You can replace pretty much the entire Office suite with Nextcloud and OnlyOffice, both of which can be easily hosted on-prem, for a fraction of the cost of paying MS for roughly the same thing on their awful infrastructure.

If it was feasible for business to change to a free alternative, I guarantee they would’ve done so.

They have. Just because you haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It’s pretty easy (and inexpensive) these days to run Linux desktop OSes like RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu on a VM running on Proxmox or OpenShift, complete with multiple monitor support and GPU. Hell, you can even run a Windows VM if you want. All you need is a system (like a thin client) with enough grunt to run a browser, and enough ports to handle multiple monitors and USB accessories.

And businesses aren’t interested in “free”, they’re interested in support, which they are willing to pay for. This is how companies like Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE make their money. The OS is free, but you can pay for professional support.