Making LInux compatible with MS-Access

The main reason why Linux has struggled on the desktop PC of companies is because of a single program, which is MS-Access. This single program has top priority for companies but it has a low priority with the Open Source ecosystem. A naive approach to adress the issue is to recommend to replace existing MS-access database with modern backend databases. Under Linux operating systems it can be realized with mysql for the server and PHP as a frontend programming language.

Unfurtunately, this advice works not very good in reality. Converting existing MS-access database into PHP scripts which are displayed in the browser is equal to start a large scale software project. It will take million of manhours and will costs million of US$. No company in the world is rich enough in doing so. And what the users are doing instead is not to use Linux in general and stay on the well known MS-Windows plus MS-Access software.

Suppose a company doesn't has existing .mdb files on the harddrive but they need the computer only for browsing in the internet, write some python scripts and create LibreOffice textfiles. Then it's pretty easy to switch from the Windows 10 operating system to a modern Debian Linux system. The problem is, that in reality, the average company has a need for a desktop database.

There is an Open Source software available which can maybe adress the problem. It's called mdbtool and was started 15 years ago. MDBtools is a software for reading existing Microsoft Access databases. https://github.com/brianb/mdbtools/tree/master/doc The format is outdated because the current format is called ACCDB and mdbtool can't write in the format. But the tool goes into the right direction. Suppose the software is improved a bit. The idea is not to create a database with Linux, but the idea is, that the real need is to read and write the MDB fileformat. In theory, this will help to bring LInux to the desktop.

Let us go a step back and analyze why the LibreOffice suite is a good replacement for existing Microsoft Office software. Because the tool is able to open and write in the same file format. If the user has any Word document he can open the file easily with Libreoffice. For the MS-Access software such a converter isn't available. Instead the normal Linux user is asked to write and read from different file formats like json, csv files and mysql databases. But these formats are different from the existing one. The MS-access fileformat is too important for the desktop PC to ignore it.