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Businesses dismayed  at the prospect of being forced to move to Windows Vista, due to its associated hardware upgrade costs and poor performance, might consider moving to Linux instead as a viable alternative. Or so a recent article appearing at PC World suggests.

Since Windows XP remains available only as a “downgrade” from Vista, at additional cost, businesses that want to replace obsolescent PCs or need to add staff are compelled to buy Windows Vista and then pay extra if they want to stay with Windows XP. In order to avoid the cost of “downgrading” to XP by migrating all desktops to Vista, they’re faced with the added cost of all new Vista licences, plus high hardware replacement costs because Vista requires new PCs kitted out with at least 2GHz CPUs and 2GB of memory in order to run acceptably. Then there’s also the fact that Windows Vista performs poorly, even after SP1.

Businesses that want to avoid such a large hit to their IT budgets should perhaps consider migrating to Linux instead. All of the Linux distributions are available either entirely free of charge or at relatively low cost including vendor support.

Linux runs well even on older PC hardware, which means businesses can avoid having to purchase all new desktop PCs.

All of the major Linux distributions include free file and print servers, website and email servers and clients, office productivity applications, development toolsets and utilities.

Good Linux support is available from the larger distribution vendors at reasonable rates. Also, most cities and large towns have a local community of techies who offer support for Linux and applications running under it.

Sure, a business might incur some setup, initial support and staff familiarisation costs, but just the additional Windows Vista-related expenses avoided within the initial year alone by moving away from a Microsoft-centric IT environment will likely be well worth making the switch. In addition, the first-year cost savings might be dwarfed by further IT cost savings realised in future years by using Linux to avoid Microsoft’s treadmill of recurring charges.

How much cash can a business save by making the switch to Linux instead of ” upgrading” to Vista? Here’s an admittedly incomplete, per-seat estimate of the cost savings:

The above breakdown shows that a business might save from $1,000 to $2,050 per seat by moving to Linux. The lower estimate assumes that it buys a very inexpensive replacement desktop PC, won’t remain on Windows XP and so won’t incur the “downgrade” charge for that, and already has a user licence for MS Office. The higher estimate assumes that it buys a higher end desktop or notebook PC, will stay with XP and so will incur the “downgrade” charge for that, and purchases a user licence for MS Office.

In contrast, switching to Linux won’t require a business to replace its existing desktop PC hardware or buy expensive operating system or office productivity applications licences.

The PC World article has a lot more details, but the business case for switching to Linux instead of suffering through a forced and costly migration to Windows Vista seems clear. µ