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IT Linux

Ask Slashdot: Is Your Company Using Linux Desktops? 198

Posted by EditorDavid from the IT-sez dept.
SomeoneFromBelgium writes: Yesterday I spoke to a friend of mine who works for a company developing mostly integrated network solutions which are purely Linux-based. He complained that he was unable to convince his IT department to provide him and his fellow developers and testers with a Linux desktop. They stated that "it was more secure when using a VM".

We both agreed that the more likely problem is that the IT department is solely geared towards a Windows desktop environment and that they have neither the skills nor the inclination to support any other platform.

This got me wondering: is this also your experience?
I bet Slashdot's readers have stories to tell, with enlightening experiences in corporate workplaces over the years gone by. So feel free to share your thoughts, opinions, and anecdotes in the comments.

And is your company using Linux desktops?
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Ask Slashdot: Is Your Company Using Linux Desktops? More

Ask Slashdot: Is Your Company Using Linux Desktops?

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  • ha ha ha ha (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dallas May ( 4891515 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @08:36PM (#59471924)

    No.

    • wish I had mod points ;) lol

    • Yes.

    • Currently, I am not working at a place with Linux desktops. My previous employments was optional, with the caviot that I needed to be able to perform all my functions that the other employees and customers who use windows can do. This means sharing office files, interacting with Outlook emails and calendars...

      I myself was able to accomplish having a Linux Desktop, however, other employees including developers had a harder time, as Linux tends to give us the compatibly however it requires extra steps to ope

  • I demanded one, since I deploy Linux servers all day and got one. The IT department has no resources to manage or support it so I have to do it myself.

    • The VM IS more secure for most Orgs and people (Score:5, Insightful)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @10:36PM (#59472210)

      I'm not saying that Linux is insecure. I'm saying that if your organization doesn't support Linux or lacks a qualified security plan for Linux then deploying a linux box is not going to be safe for the Org. and You will be responsible for keeping it safe and patched. And you might even be qualified to do that but the Org has no way to validate that you have done. THis not only makes them less secure it makes then less certain about their security envelope. And if you leave, and the machine isn't pulled down then it's a disaster waiting to happen.

      Much safer to have a VM running on top of the OS the org has a defined security profile and test system for.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Damn, and today I don't have any mod points.

        I'm fortunate in that my work (Amazon) there is a huge installed base for Windows, Mac and various flavors of Linux, as well as AWS serverless computing. We have internal support for all of them (of varying quality depending on the users, of course), and patch monitoring for most of them. They're ruthless about maintaining security patches, I've had security NVRs quarantined for being behind on patches (that was a mess).

      • I hate to say it, but that's pretty sensible. Much of Linux can also be stupidly deployed, kept unpatched/updated/fixed/incorrectly configured. There aren't many really good centralized security control packages that ALSO cover Windows, although a few cover Macs. This means the user has to be actively keeping up to date, and lots of users aren't as diligent as they think they are. Rogue instances are rogue instances. Thanks to fabulously sophisticated instances of K8s/Docker/dbs/SDNs, a single instance of *

  • This will be the shortest ask slashdot ever.....

    https://system76.com/ [system76.com] is your only hope.

    • I have been thinking this for the last 20 years but this year it has become reality thanks to POP-OS.

      originally on windows, migrated to mac with linux in VM in 2005 with first intel macs, and now have gone the whole hog and bought the system76 hardware as well, and have now rolled it out to our company (med tech) .

      System76 seem to embody the the best bits of Jobs in terms of design and functional aesthetics, a bare bones customisable UI with good maintenance and out-of-the-box machine learning.

      I am sure so

    • "This got me wondering: is this also your experience?"

      Do I work in a Linux centered company that uses Windows? No, and when rounding nobody does. That's stupid and you should quit.

  • It's coming. It'll be here annnnnny day now!

  • Linux or Windows, developers choice (Score:5, Interesting)

    by backbyter ( 896397 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @08:54PM (#59471970)

    All tools are cross platform, so unless the client is providing the computer, our company policy is to use what you're effective with.

  • If not then why are you even on Slashdot? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zero__Kelvin ( 151819 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @08:55PM (#59471974) Homepage
    This is the question that will separate the men from the boys. Of course I am provided Linux systems wherever I go. I'm a Linux professional. On the other hand these days if you walk into a Lowes Home Improvement you will notice that they use Linux systems for all their computers as well. Basically there are a bunch of amateurs who are about to post that Linux isn't a thing, but the real professionals will have Linux on their desktop systems.

    • Iâ(TM)ve been using Linux since 1994, and still do for various jobs. I stopped trying to use it on the desktop more than a decade ago. I guess I matured and left the boys behind.

      • So you are an expert qualified to offer opinions on a product you haven't ever tried (there is no comparison between Desktop Linux 10 years ago and today)? I'll be sure to weigh your input accordingly.

    • I'm on dashslot because nerds tend to think they are the smartest person in the room and need to be corrected. It's certainly not for the editing. And not for theodp whinging about his jerb.

      I used to follow the legal bits and Linux news, but now it's just correcting people who should know better.

      You asked, I answered.

  • Slackware and Mint.

  • Yes. In scientific research. (Score:5, Informative)

    by MarchHare ( 82901 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @09:15PM (#59472012)

    I work for a medical research group. We have about 40 developers and 100 people on the research side (including students). We use almost only Linux desktops, and some Macs. Devs often spawn VMs on them, and other non-dev users can get VMs on dedicated CentOS servers we own. We write many of our own IT tools too.

    I think we might have one or two windows desktops, for the graphics designer guy.

    • Can't he do his work in gimp?

    • You have Macs and give Windows machines to the GRAPHIC DESIGNER? That's... cold.

      • You have Macs and give Windows machines to the GRAPHIC DESIGNER? That's... cold.

        I had a job doing (in part) graphics design for a casino. Every tool I used was available both on Windows and Mac, but the former designer was a typical artist mac user type (incapable of learning a new interface, that is) so on my desk I had three machines. One PC to run Scala (which we never actually implemented), one laptop PC to do database reporting (my actual job title), and a Dual G5 to run Adobe CS. The Macintosh was by far the most annoying machine I had to deal with. The community is so much small

  • It's their job to ensure that the corporate network is secure. They have no Linux skills. For them it is a crazy unknown risk to have Linux on their network in a way they can't control. If it's in a VM at least they can control the host OS. Sorry. Good luck!

    • This. I admin a lot of servers.. Linux servers. Mostly Centos and Redhat these days but a fair number of Suse, Debian, and Ubunt. IT makes us run Windows on our workstations, because they don't have the skills or tools to be able to Administer large numbers of Linux boxes. And most users in my company are your average idiot user who you can't trust at all. Which is fine with me, if there's something I want to do natively in Linux I have a host of servers available to me that I can use. Most of the time all

  • Some (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dwywit ( 1109409 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @09:26PM (#59472054)

    As I'm self-employed, I use Windows XP (air-gapped personal media player), Windows 7 to support many customers, Windows 10 to support others, Linux - with desktop - for various jobs that customers need doing e.g. streaming media player, and Linux headless for some other work such as a file&print server, or apache for a company intranet, or media conversion - ffmpeg is *fast*. I've even got an old 32-bit Toshiba Centrino Duo running Pi-Hole for the home network.

    I seem to accumulate 2-5-year-old laptops at a fair rate. Customers, even against my advice, replace their laptops and tell me to take their old ones away. They're nearly all running Windows 7or 8/8.1, and the first thing I do is assess - "how could this device be useful?" All but two have been given a new life with a vanilla Debian/KDE installation. One went to a sports club to run a scoreboard, one went to a small school to run squid, and so on.

  • From Windows Desktop to Linux Desktop... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by farrellj ( 563 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @09:27PM (#59472060) Homepage Journal

    I built a custom version of Linux for a company that made medical office management computer systems. Until I did so, they had been using an AIX server backend running a database application, and Windows on the workstations throughout the doctor's offices. They would then use a terminal program to connect to the backend via a Windows Telnet client. I was told they had over five thousand workstations installed.

    The system that I built replaced the backend AIX server with an IBM box running Linux, and Linux on each of the workstations. They then started upgrading all of the doctor's offices to this new system. On the old system, they had a support staff for the workstations of anywhere from 6 to 10 people depending on the time of the month, etc. The server side was usually handled by the programmers. When they switched to the custom version of Linux I built for them, they saved a great deal of money on the Microsoft tax on the workstations, and not having to buy expensive AIX servers. They also found their call volume for support dropped by over two-thirds. With the tools I integrated into the distro, support was amazing simple, and call times plummeted as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      But....but.... total cost of ownership etc...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dwywit ( 1109409 )

      I can believe the costs for Microsoft support would have plummeted, but not for the backend.

      AIX (and i) POWER-based machines cost a lot to buy, but you can put them in a closet and forget about them. There's a reason why they have fierce supporters. IBM p-series and i-series machines have phenomenal reliability.

      I've had some unfortunate experience with IBM Intel servers (x series). Never again.

      • Which is why you can put linux on them now. Redhat or Cent on Power is just insane for uptime, especially if your running databases.

  • Sneaking Unix into the corporate world (Score:4, Informative)

    by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @09:28PM (#59472062) Journal

    At the companies I owned, we used Linux. They were security companies, so we darn sure weren't going to be using Windows (this eas several years ago).

    When I went to work for someone else, an organization that had an IT department controlling things with GPOs, I was sad when I was offered the choice between Windows and Mac. I got a Mac, opened the terminal, and uses it precisely the same way I had always used Linux. All of the open-source software I liked just worked. I soon discovered that Mac isn't Unix-like, it is Unix(tm). Mac is real, official, certified Unix. With a slick GUI on top.

    If you want Linux but can't easily have Linux, keep that in mind - Mac is real Unix. You may be perfectly happy with it. Mac prices are a little high, but if the company is paying I can live with that.

    Now I have a Windows machine with a couple Linux VMs :(
    I'm also running Kali Linux as part of the Windows system with WSL. That wouldn't be bad if the WSL terminal didn't suck absolute ass. As in no support for copy-paste.

  • Yes if desired by the user, I an on RHEL 7.7, but Ubuntu and Fedora is allowed. I heard rumors people on Ubuntu need to move to RHEL/Fedora

  • Ignorance ... (Score:3)

    by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @09:33PM (#59472076) Homepage

    They stated that "it was more secure when using a VM".

    This is sheer ignorance on their part. Perhaps they only want to run it the only way they themselves run it ...

    I have been running Linux as my sole desktop (and server) for about 15 years or so, on bare metal (all Intel and AMD, laptop and desktops, the latter headless servers, no GUI). Security is not an issue at all, since Linux is less prone to have malware (you don't run it as an administrator, you don't open ports unless you actually need them, you don't install software unless you need it, less targeted desktop attacks for Linux than other platforms, and so on).

    A Linux machine (desktop or server) is not more secure when in a VM or on bare metal. One can argue to the contrary: that it is more secure if it is the native operating system on the bare metal (i.e. less components = less attack surface).

  • I work for a database company. 100% of our customers use Linux. Our computers? Only Mac and Windows are supported. Linux? You're on your own. A few percent of the engineers do it, though.
  • Some use Windows, some use Linux, the design department (surprise) use more Macs. I myself use more Windows these days but I use Linux when needed.

  • Nope.. and.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by beheaderaswp ( 549877 ) * on Saturday November 30, 2019 @09:48PM (#59472110)

    I'm the IT Director for a modestly large manufacturer. Linux has also been my core skill over the last 18 years.

    Linux is great. Many different flavors... all kinds of freedoms. Access to source code. Great stability. The ability to replace Windows servers in certain areas/configurations. Linux is the only way to go for LAMP.

    But let's face it.... it's crap on the desktop.

    As a qualification- I love it on the desktop... but I can delve into the command line when needed and it's my job to do so.

    But... we've got specialized applications we need to run which are not supported on Linux. And Wine is not an answer. If/When wine decides not to work I've got 100 milling machines that are down. Employees cannot access parts of the accounting system. Employees cannot clock in or clock out.

    Plus- none of the engineering software we use to feed designs to our mills runs on Linux. And none of it will work on wine.

    Will that change? Possibly. But I'm not holding my breath.

    Though on the server side it's indispensable... File servers... Domain servers... web servers... network monitoring... Industrial machine clients (using Microsoft protocols).... Virtualization......Heck my phone system is 100% Linux- including the phones.

    I roll out more Linux every day.

    But not on the desktop. I can't train these line employees on how to use anything other than windows. The efficiency expense is too high. It would take up a year. Also- all those little mistakes that users do on Windows to screw up their machines have greater consequences on Linux. That means more expense for techs as well.

    I can easily find a Linux guy willing to be a server jockey. But ask them to service workstations and they'll balk even if I pay them as server engineers.

    So many issues.

    But in the future there may be more of the support I would need to go to a Linux Desktop. I'd like to. I could lower expenses greatly. Though not yet.

    Someone will probably come around and tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. But every morning I walking a building where a couple hundred employees are going to demand that it works. I owe them and the company something that's not quite fully baked.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shess ( 31691 )

      Yep. A bunch of end-user enthusiasts and independent developers can have completely valid opinions which simply don't work in a corporate setting.

      I say this as someone who's first day on his last job started with "Here's a computer, setup Linux" - we needed to get special permission to have a Windows or OSX machine, which was super annoying when my job description was primarily "Help port a Windows thing to run on OSX." The company was chock full of elite-level geeks developing software, and even so Linux

    • Why should "we" "face it" that Linux is grasp on the desktop?

      It's a matter of taste and what you're used to. I don't use Linux because I'm some sort of masochist. Simply prefer it strongly top either windows or mac. My company mostly uses a mix though Linux gets and frankly requires little support from IT. No one has to use it, but the deep learning engineers look as you funny if you offer anything else.

      Turns out Linux is the thing in that field. Nvidia put a ton of work into servers which means their GPUs

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nomadic ( 141991 )

      "I can't train these line employees on how to use anything other than windows. The efficiency expense is too high. It would take up a year."

      Yes, I think this is kind of a big point which the self-professed elite linux maestros may often miss. Actually, given how many of these remarks are like "well our AI developers only use linux!" then I'm pretty certain they do miss it.

    • But let's face it.... it's crap on the desktop.

      No. What?

      we've got specialized applications we need to run which are not supported on Linux.

      That doesn't make Linux crap. It makes it not viable for you, but that's not the same thing at all.

      I can't train these line employees on how to use anything other than windows.

      It sounds like the workers are crap. For most use cases, the users are just click-click-clicking. If they can't learn to click on something new, why did "you" (your employer) hire them? Won't they have the same kind of trouble if they have to solve any other simple kinds of problems in the course of their job duties?

      Someone will probably come around and tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. But every morning I walking a building where a couple hundred employees are going to demand that it works. I owe them and the company something that's not quite fully baked.

      The argument you gave us is not quite fully baked. Your concluding sentence, in partic

  • I have been in this industry since the mid 1990s. I can't recall the last time I *didn't* have a Linux desktop. These days, that's a pretty standard configuration for software engineers, and it has been that way for more than two decades.

    On the other hand, using a VM isn't necessarily wrong. Depends on how it is set up. For most of my day-to-day work, I actually use a Pixelbook. And all of the Linux applications run inside of a container (which lives inside of a VM). This implementation detail is mostly inv

  • We're somewhat split between Macs and ChromeOS (email is Google). From the perspective of managing the company, I prefer Chromebooks because of their cost/performance, quite simple IT support requirements along with the fact that they're being marketed to schools, they're pretty rugged.

    Macs were the first choice of many of the employees, but they're accepting Chromebooks as being quite easy to work with and figure out how the basic Office equivalent apps work.

  • I work for a consulting company and recently found about a company (not my customer, just heard about it internally at my company) using Linux desktops in a VDI environment. In over 20 years, that's the first I'd ever heard of outside of conferences. Plenty using variants of Linux for thin-clients, but when it comes to business desktops virtually all of those are accessing Windows systems on the back end. They are out there, but I'd guess it's less than 0.1% of all business desktop users.
  • IBMer here. We have RHEL as a tertiary desktop option on Lenovo P and T series ThinkPad laptops but most people have Apple Macbook Pro or Windows 10 now due to the slightly better hardware options. Shame as I've been happily using RHEL as my daily driver for years now.

    • I worked for IBM in the form of working support for Tivoli just post-acquisition, and I used Linux on my desktop. It's so long ago that I don't even remember what distribution I was using, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't redhate. I think it might actually have been slackware. But then, we hadn't been fully IBM'd yet. We got more BM'd upon as time went by, and it became a worse and worse place to work.

      That was a special case, though, both because we weren't all-blue yet, and because everyone in support when

  • Absolutely not. We are a managed service provider that supports other businesses. They need QuickBooks, they need Sage 50, they need FileMaker, they need Office. Small businesses run on Windows because the tools they need run on Windows and that is what their staff knows how to use. Half the people I handle on a daily bases barely even know how to use Windows at that. Some of them have spent 8 hours a day sitting in from of a computer for 30 years and its all still new to them. It really is like that scene

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sfcat ( 872532 )

      Absolutely not. We are a managed service provider that supports other businesses. They need QuickBooks, they need Sage 50, they need FileMaker, they need Office. Small businesses run on Windows because the tools they need run on Windows and that is what their staff knows how to use. Half the people I handle on a daily bases barely even know how to use Windows at that. Some of them have spent 8 hours a day sitting in from of a computer for 30 years and its all still new to them. It really is like that scene from the IT Crowd. When Windows 10 rolled out we had people scrambling because the vendor website of some Fortune 500 company that they rely on hasn't seen an upgrade since the Clinton administration and only works in Internet Explorer. Well, one Blue E is the same as any other Blue E, right? They had no idea what Edge was or where to find IE or how to do anything. If it isn't a shortcut on the desktop it doesn't exist. Hell, we had one client that was so married to IE that he had us deploy a GPO that prevented users from even installing Firefox or Chrome. They didn't even have a website that required IE, he just refused to let any of his staff use anything else because that is what *he* was comfortable with. He also forced all of them to have their taskbar locked to the right side of the screen like a psychopath. All of our clients run Windows so we run Windows. Kind of hard to be an MS certified vendor when you don't drink the Kool-Aid yourself. That said, rarely do I encounter actual "Windows" problems that much anymore. A bad update here, a backward compatibility problem there, that's it. Almost everything is a user problem, a 3rd party software problem, a hardware problem (and mostly internet at that). It is not really as bad as it once was. I've only been in IT since the XP days, so I can't talk about Windows 9X, but in the last 15 years, Windows has come a long way. I think the Linux Desktop missed the boat at this point. Decades of "the year of the Linux Desktop" and they still don't have any heavy hitters making software for them for the desktop user. Servers? Absolutely. Desktop? For the average user? Haha, nah. Most of the big apps out there simply don't support it and no one is going to bother to run Wine to get their Windows native apps running on Linux. People just want it to work as cheaply and easily as possible. Sure, there are alternatives, but we all know they aren't the same thing. Like store brand cereal, it's close but it doesn't taste quite right. YouTube link for anyone here not familiar with the IT Crowd reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      You are why the cloud is popular and making so much money. FileMaker? Seriously? Is this 1995? When the cloud services started, many IT folk including me wondered why? Now I get it. Its not your Windows based IT department. Literally anything is better than that. That's why the cloud is popular. Your days are numbered Lando...

  • From about 2004 - 2015, all my computers were linux based (especially the time I worked for RedHat). But I always looked for linux-based jobs at small companies, so I always had the flexibility to pick the tools I needed for the job. It wasn't until I recently switched to the security field that my employers provided macs and didn't offer linux laptops.

  • My company gives most engineers a linux desktop for software development as well as a MacBook Pro or Chrome Book for other tasks.

    We also encourage the use of virtual Linux servers for those employees that don't want a physical footprint of a desktop computer.

  • We both agreed that the more likely problem is that the IT department is solely geared towards a Windows desktop environment and that they have neither the skills nor the inclination to support any other platform.

    If the IT Department said they're fine with running it in a VM, how in the fuck does it follow that "that they have neither the skills nor the inclination to support [Linux]" you daft, condescending ass?

  • Where I work, all three are supported. Most people in my area prefer Macs. I have a Linux machine and a Windows machine. The former requires zero support. The latter ... (... "your copy of Windows is not genuine" ...) not so much. The Macs also always seem to have trouble ("Virus warning. To arms! To arms!")

    Who knows? I have no answer to this question. To each their own.

  • Switch the Flip (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RedLeg ( 22564 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @11:24PM (#59472294) Journal
    Two points:

    First: Somebody has their priorities backwards. IT SUPPORTS the business units who bring in the cash. If you're developing linux-based software, of course you need a native linux environment, not necessarily to develop, but to test and debug as it will be deployed.

    Solution: Take this up with management, if you couch the argument correctly, it will come DOWN to IT from on high as a directive, as it should be.

    Second: I ran into this problem about 20 years ago, and we lost the argument. SO, per IT, go get VMWare...... and then we cloned the IT weenies Windows install, and ran it in a VM hosted in the linux we installed on our desktops.

    Caveats:

    • If it breaks, you own both pieces and all the problems. You ARE your own support. If you call IT to support the unsupported architecture, the game is up.....
    • When on the road, we had to "Switch the Flip", and run the linux in a VM hosted by the IT departments windows image, in order to tunnel home through the corporate, windows only, VPN.

    Not sure how much of this is relevant twenty years later, but you get the drift.....

    -Red

  • No (Score:2)

    by nnet ( 20306 )
    No. Macs.

  • The whole VFX / animation industry does (Score:3, Informative)

    by exophoric ( 6423754 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @11:47PM (#59472352)
    CentOS desktops are the norm in VFX. Artists run proprietary DCC softwares built for Linux such as Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Mari, Arnold, Flame... It's even standardized: http://vfxplatform.com/ [vfxplatform.com] Unfortunately, a few software vendors only live in the Win/Mac world (namely Adobe) and force us to dualboot.

  • We do feature film visual effects and out of 100 staff there's maybe.. 85 on Linux workstations doing modeling, rigging, animation, dynamics simulations, compositing and lighting across the entire pipeline. The remainder are on Mac workstations and 3 floating Windows workstations for the couple of applications that only run on that platform.

  • Yep (Score:5, Informative)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday November 30, 2019 @11:58PM (#59472376)

    >"Is Your Company Using Linux Desktops?"

    Yes, for as long as we have used desktops. 20 years? Now around 250 of them or so.

    >"the IT department is solely geared towards a Windows desktop environment. This got me wondering: is this also your experience?"

    Nope, I am in charge of the IT department. That makes it quite a lot easier to design the environment around Linux and mostly open-source software :)

  • Windows 10 laptops as somewhat thin clients, Exceed-on-Demand into Linux clusters for "real" work (Outlook and other MS Office stuff notwithstanding).

  • My company does technical work which requires a windows-only set of tools; it's a fairly big pile o' software and takes a while to download and set up. Everything else (email, office suite, etc.) doesn't care what OS you use.
    The users get a laptop with kubuntu as the host OS because it's well-supported and looks enough like windows to not freak people out. And a VM with all the special software so I only have to install it once.

    For folks that want to use the linux host OS, it's there. I really don't kno

  • The problem is support (Score:3)

    by wyattstorch516 ( 2624273 ) on Sunday December 01, 2019 @12:47AM (#59472464)
    Anybody who has a good proficiency with Linux does not want to do desktop support. In the current market they don't need to either. So how is the IT department supposed to support the users?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )

      Anybody who has a good proficiency with Linux does not want to do desktop support. In the current market they don't need to either. So how is the IT department supposed to support the users?

      Simple, if somebody needs "support" to work with a Linux desktop, then he should not use it. Many should not use Macs or Windows on the operation system level, either, but are so IT-illiterate that some web-forms are all they should be using.

      But that is not quite a reason to keep engineers/developers among the staff from using a decent operating system like Linux on their desktops.

  • More secure than what? Windows? Osx? Bare metal Linux?

    I mean, whoever agrees with that logic is just ignorant of Linux altogether. Certainly a VM might be considered more secure than bare metal, but since when is bare metal Linux considered insecure?

    I use Linux for absolutely everything in my small business as I have for over a decade. I use it on desktops, in servers, and containers. I use proxmox for many applications per a single computer. It adds to the layers of security.

    I never use windows for a

  • I have my Debian Linux servers, but since the majority of people in the company are non-tech administrative drones, Microsoft Office is Necessary (this is non-negotiable and not my decision). Therefore Windows 10 is the medium by which MS Office is delivered. That's corporate reality.

    And honestly, I'm okay with that. Linux as a desktop is a pain in the ass for most of the things I need to do to get real work done. Code IDE (Eclipse is so slow), Visio, 16-bit image editing and don't even say gimp, Multisi

  • There are over 2000 approved applications in use in my company. *nix simply does not have replacements for them all. For those that want an alternative means supporting additional OSes, which is increased workload for IT, so is not happening - for now.

    We're investigating thin clients using existing x86 older devices though, so that may involve a *nix booting OS. Also looking at Android phones that can run a VM with kb/mouse/external display for those where that profile might fit.

    • Robots and drones and web servers run better on a serious OS like linux than a malware platform like windows. Office stuff runs in chrome anyway. Can you even run ROS on it? It's not realtime alas like ChibiOs but has better networking support.

  • No, but the only reason is Microsoft Office. Every thing else is web based or can be used via RDP/VM if really needed (old legacy software).

    Office was always the true Microsoft killer app.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nomadic ( 141991 )

      True. No, openoffice/libreoffice/google docs is not a sufficient replacement because they've never gotten the compatibility right.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ffkom ( 3519199 )
        I have been using Libreoffice (and before that OpenOffice) for the last two decades in companies where many used Microsoft office, and never had any substantial trouble doing so.
  • All those mega blockbuster movies that you absolutely hate, but smash box office records? Those were done on a Linux. Not free (as in freedom) software mind you, but the workstations for those monsters do run Linux. Umm, here is one tool, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • We give our developers reasonably specced Dell Optiplexes. They can use the supplied Windows install or replace it with whatever they wish. We are split between Windows, CentOS (my choice) and Ubuntu.

    As long as they complete their tasks and don't burden other IT staff with OS support requests all is well.

  • I make sure with every person I meet during my programming job interview that I am allowed to, how many do, and whether I can expect every internal network resource to function with a Linux distro.

    My current employer has ~90% Mac, ~5% Arch Linux, and ~5% Debian-based Linux employees. Windows is strictly forbidden.

  • at a local small Financial Services company. For their IT technical, admin and customer support staff. it provides them with everything that they need. They are very security conscious which is one of the reasons that they avoid MS Windows. It replaced CentOS 6 which is dropping out of support next year. They run CentOS on their servers.

    They did not like the Gnome 3 desktop - so replaced it with Xfce; Mate has not yet been ported to CentOS 8 - unfortunately.

    Myself: I use Linux: CentOS & Linux Mint mostl

  • It's (mostly) not about IT guy not understanding Linux. It's more about Windows allowing centralized control over updates, user authentication, etc. Most Linux users don't patch their desktops promptly, they rarely change passwords, they share users ("just log into my machine with "guest" account), don't bother installing company root certs (so they simply keep on clicking "proceed anyways" when websites fail cert validation, which makes them targets for exploits), etc, creating an breeding ground for malic

  • We have Win10 disktops, but Apple and Linux are tolerated. I asked the IT department to only put Win10 on one partition, and to leave the rest open. Installed Linux, haven't booted to Win10 in a couple of years. All of the IT stuff (printers, shared data, etc) is accessible, although sometimes the set-up is a bit abstruse.

  • That's ridiculous. I have an old laptop running bodhi linux (though getting disillusioned with that particular distro) off the guest network for experimenting and playing music, but I need to be plugged into all those annoying MS apps because otherwise my job would be much, much harder. Hell, even when I was working in a place where I had the freedom to use whatever I want I didn't use linux because I didn't want to have to constantly deal with compatibility issues when working with coworkers. "Ok, send me

  • If he's developing hardware solutions and they won't let him have the tools he needs to program it, then it's a shit place to work.

    Sorry, no, serial port emulation isn't highly reliable or faithful.

    IT can firewall his port if they're fearful but they need to support the company's business needs.

  • That's a security risk!

    Sophistry aside, I always run as close as possible to the production hardware and software. Back when I worked for Sun, my wife bought me a SPARC laptop for Christmas, so I could run the SPARC port of Solaris instead of the Intel. It made my work immensely easier.

    To this day, in a dev/ops role, I run the newest release of our production OS, with all the security updates. That ensures I'm as secure as prod, but on the release we'll be on later. These days that means Fedora and RHE

  • .... I have ever seen.

    "It's crap, but I like if [for various reasons]"

    Our organization (500-1000 employees) supports Windows and MacOS. Supporting any other additional front would be too much. The ecosystem of Linux desktops is a tiny niche compared to Windows and MacOS and it makes no sense to support it for a serious organization like ours.

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