Basically title. Do you know of any companies that use desktop Linux?
I can think of two in my area in Brisbane - Adfinis and Red Hat. Both have a pretty small presence here from what I last heard (several employees each).
My employer allows the Linux team to use Linux but it’s discouraged and our lives are made somewhat difficult.
I opened up the floodgates at my office dedicating support for anyone wanting to. All our servers and production are Linux so probably 1/4 of the staff is cli literate.
So far it’s me with NixOS and one other guy running Debian.
Half the remaining use WSL.
This is why Microsoft made WSL, they knew they were losing ground big time amongst devs.
I’ve loved WSL. I’ve been able to throw an Ubuntu CLI in front of 30 devs that had almost no Linux experience. I’ve got them scripting and doing service control. The ssh terminal is reasonable, they can use standard openssh pems. The only real problem is the VM doesn’t play with cisco well so they can’t easily VPN and use the VPN sesh in WSL. I have workarounds, but they’re kinda crappy.
We have both Linux and Windows machines in my team. We do all the work in Linux, and register hours in Windows. We also all have iPhones that we only use for 2FA.
We also all have iPhones that we only use for 2FA.
That’s some expenses right there.
register hours in Windows. We also all have iPhones that we only use for 2FA.
Without background information that sounds kind of insane. Switching to alternative time tracking software and getting YubiKeys or alternatives instead for 2FA would’ve saved so much money as well as time every day.
I’m assuming they meant that they were company phones, and that additionally they were required for any work related MFA requirements.
If that’s the case, it would be YubiKey in addition to, not instead of.
As for the time tracking software, those are often part of a much larger accounting, payroll, and/or HR software suite. Having his team spin up Windows vms, or even have separate older windows boxes somewhere, probably makes more financial sense than not. At least, until they can switch to a more modern suite that has a web portal.
Retail stores, restaurants, hotels, logistics and shipping companies…tons. You may thinking Gnome or KDE, which you’ll probably be more likely to see in dev teams.
In my team we use both Linux and Mac (I don’t want to disclose my company, but it’s in Sweden). IT isn’t entirely happy about some of us using Linux because it’s more difficult for them to administer the computers (i.e. install spyware), but so far they’ve been unsuccessful in making us switch.
I Sysadmin in education here in Brisbane. Half our server stack is Linux on a Nutanix hypervisor. I do all my work from Linux, my junior admin recently moved his workstation to Fedora KDE, I use Kinoite.
The student and staff devices are 95% Windows, manager doesn’t care what we use to administer. Officially we’re a “Microsoft School”
It’s sad you don’t teach students about Linux instead because Windows is getting worse and it’s pretty bad already.
I just build what they need, networks, auth, security etc -I’ll leave teaching to the teachers
Hostpoint, one of the largest hosting companies of Switzerland uses Linux Desktop Clients.
Sunshine Coast here. We all use Linux desktop. Libre office. Gimp. Krita. Inkscape. Vscodium. Thunderbird. Sublime. Etc etc. We have a programmer who favoured Windows. We finally converted him. Now we only have the mac laptop to deal with having to do osx builds.
we can decide ourselfs if we want mac, windows or ubuntu (no other distro allowed). Our code runs in docker containers and except for the IDE our tools are web-based for the most part anyway, so it doesn’t really matter which OS you use. though I heard there were quite a few issues with docker and Mac when the first M-chip Macs were used. it’s a software company in Germany with ~150 people.
My work use it in a limited capacity.
We primarily use Windows but some also use MacOS and some use our internal Linux spin off Ubuntu. With some internal tools and all that.
The Linux users are primarily developers and a few Linux admins and I’m pretty sure the Linux platform is maintained by a developer.
I work for a web host (UK based). We’re entirely WFH so as long as you can support it yourself you can use it. They don’t care what Distro we use.
Worked for a SaaS company that let you manage your own OS (with some rules in place). Ubuntu was the standard choice, with some Manjaro installs here and there, but there were also people who felt more comfortable on Windows.
Current company has everyone outfitted with Windows laptops with GPO and endpoint monitoring and the like, but then half the company does their work in a Linux VM. Would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
Where I work,~2,000 employees and contractors, I’m almost certain I’m the one person using Linux (Fedora) and refusing to use Windows (so they deployed a cloud Windows 365 instance for me to have access to the in-house platform).
I’m blessed to hold a position for which the company would have a really hard time replacing me, I think that’s why they haven’t booted me (chances are they will at some point, but I don’t care anymore).
It still blows my mind how the IT team tries to justify being locked into Microsoft, and then telling me I could potentially become a point of vulnerability, when my system is easily the most secure in the whole company and my habits make for little to no possibility of ever exposing anything outside of the company.
how the IT team tries to justify being locked into Microsoft, and then telling me I could potentially become a point of vulnerability
Because they can manage and control all the windows PCs , pushing updates automatically, restricting what users can do locally and on the network, they have monitoring tools and whatever antivirus and antimalware tools they have, and are able to easily manage and deploy/remove software and associated group licensing and so on and so forth.
Meanwhile you’re a single user of unknown (to them) capabilities that they now have to trust with the rest of their system, basically.
The first rule of corporate IT is, “control what’s on your network”. Your PC is their concern still, but they have no effective control over it. That’s why they’re being a bit of a pain in the ass about it.
Yeah, I get the philosophy behind their actions and intent. They can audit that cloud PC all they want. In my computer, I’m lord, god and king, nobody gets to see what happens there but me and those I want to.
Yep, and to the person justifying the IT department’s invasion of privacy: they’ve been lying to us for years, there are breaches ALL THE TIME. Workers will give up every right in the face of corporate excuses? 🤷♂️
What’s wild to me is Linux systems can offer better lockdowns than Windows.
Its just vendor lock and their CTOs are at fault to me
So they are gaslighting to cause you to have doubts. So they are using a psyche which is a symptom of them having unrestricted access to your time and ears
In my experience, the larger the company, the more likely they are to force you to use Windows. The smaller companies will be more relaxed about the whole thing.
The largest company I’ve worked for had a staff count of hundreds of engineers and hundreds more non-nerds. In their case though, the laptops were crippled with Crowdstrike and Kollide and while the tech team was working hard to support us, we were always aware that we made up around 1% of the machines they manage and represented a big chunk of their headaches.
The response to this you usually hear (from me even) is that “I don’t need support, I know what I’m doing”. Which is probably true, but the vast majority of problems is in dealing with access to proprietary systems, failures from Crowdstrike or complaints about kernel versions etc.
TL;DR: work at a small company (<100 staff) and they’ll probably leave you alone. Go bigger and you’ll be stuck fighting IT in one way or another.
I think they are a bit harder to manage
That’s either BS or FUD, pick any two. Stick to a specific distro and train your staff and there’s no reason for any IT personnel to find linux “harder to manage”.
Users grumbling it’s harder to use might be a different matter.
Stick to a specific distro and train your staff
Linux is Linux. Train your staff to properly use one and they can use them all. “Distro” is just a fancy word for “which package manager and update cycle to we chose and what logo do we put on our pre-installed wallpaper”.
The Linux desktop is harder to manage because isn’t a one box solution like Windows. With Windows you control everything via GPOs. You can’t do that on Linux as there is no centralization.
The best solution I’ve scene is Ansible and Xfce4 kiosk mode. You can set and enforce the desktop layout
Windows GPOs are a right old mess. I’ve been managing them for over two decades. The first fuck up is the word “Group”. You cannot assign Group Policy Objects to AD groups unless you use something like ZENworks or some funky WMI filters!
Settings are applied to computers or users. Many settings are available to be set for both but only make sense or even work for one or the other. MS bought out some solution providers and that’s why you get the Control Panel and other handy stuff, rather roughly bolted on.
AD with GPOs with the extension to “local machines” is a great idea but dreadful in execution. MS didn’t want to nobble third party apps in the past so that’s why we have this nonsense. Now its all about Azure/whatevs ie MS’s cloud and subscriptions.
Now you belong us!
Linux being a Unix has NIS(+) for a directory or LDAP or AD or anything else you fancy. Ansible works for all mainstream OSs, including Windows.
So often I see people confusing and conflating authentication and authorisation, machine and session state configuration databases.
I have to disagree. Group policy is absolutely the best thing that has hit the IT world. You absolutely can assign it to groups and it is pretty straight forward to make. It also has the benefit of being very wildly used and documented. Assuming Microsoft doesn’t keep screwing with it I think it is solid.
Also Active Directory is just LDAP, DNS and fileshares with configurations. You can though Kerberos (technically part of LDAP) and printers in there to. It is actually a pretty good system and I like playing with it via Samba AD.
I don’t want to be rude but if you hate Windows you probably need a new career. I don’t mind managing Windows systems the problem is Microsoft ruining the OS. It also happens to be totally proprietary and spyware which isn’t great.
I can’t say I’ve managed Linux desktops at scale (so technically I should leave it there) but I do manage several hundred Linux VMs with Ansible, and I manage all of my PCs with Ansible. Desktops are a different ballgame to servers, dealing with end users and all, but I still don’t think it would be that hard once it’s been set up.
It is just less established which means it would be hard to get the ball rolling. It is doable but would take more time than just using a basic Windows environment with AD. You also have the issue with vendor support and end user knowledge but that’s a problem for another day.
That’s probably a fair point. I can’t say too much as I haven’t touched Windows desktop or server too much.
Could be apples vs oranges here though as we’re talking about getting started versus well established setup, but my current employer is looking at adopting Ansible + Packer for imaging and partially Ansible-managing Windows servers where it makes sense because of limitations in SCCM and GPO. As far as I can see across the divide Windows Server isn’t all smooth sailing.
I wish my employer (state government) would use Linux. But unfortunately, they are all in with Microsoft. Everything has gone that way. SharePoint, Microsoft hosted Exchange, OneDrive, etc… And it’s as horrible as you can imagine. It’s awesome when I can’t access my personal files because Microsoft servers are down. And don’t get me started on the CrowdStrike fiasco!
That sucks :( I’m pretty much in the same boat. I get to use a Linux desktop at work on the proviso that I don’t raise support requests. We use Microsoft for nearly everything so naturally it’s an uphill battle. The web UI is quite buggy and “not recommended” by my org. Teams doesn’t support Firefox so I have to run a separate browser especially for it.
But aside from interfacing with Microsoft everything just works, and really nicely.
