I made this post because I am really curious if Linux is used in offices and educational centres like schools.
While we all know Windows is the mac-daddy in the business space, are there any businesses you know or workplaces that actually Linux as a business replacement for Windows?
I.e. Mint or Ubuntu, I am not strictly talking about the server side of things.
companies that do IC design, do it under linux. traditionally they were using proprietary unixes, but today it is mostly linux and redhat or compatible systems.
engineers are using rhel workstations from dell and hp that are supported by vendors to work under linux: let’s say bios updates are possible to run from within linux.
their whole workflow depends on unix with many custom scripts (shell, perl, tcl) and simulations, usage of shared filesystems, and even x forwarding.
afaik IT departments in such companies aren’t happy to support linux workstations and the trend is to move the workflew to linux servers and let the engineers to connect to those via ssh, vnc or x or commercial solutions like ‘citrix’.
my understanding is also that companies design some requirrments, though maybe based on what is available on the market, and love to have support and solutions that are integrated with each other. microsoft still has everybody hooked up, their ‘active directory’ feels to IT people necessary, they also use microsoft’s disk encryption, and/or third party windows software which encrypts everything written to usb flash drives to prevent leakage of what they call ‘intellectual property’.
it is of course possible to do luks encryption of linux disk drives, but afaik rhel doesn’t support it, or rhel versions these companies tend to use, since they tend to use very outdated systems, even eol unsupported systems, because ‘customers still use those’.
i am also not aware of linux versions of those draconian services that encrypt everything that gets written to the flash drives, or that monitor/control computer usage, web requests, etc, so companies are interested to concentrate unix systems in data centers and get rid of linux end user workstations because these require custom approaches or draconian control software is not available, while windows users can be controlled better, with available corporate solutions.
We run thousands of Red Hat VMs at my company (and probably as many Windows), and several of my colleagues run various distros on their laptops with all our required desktop tools/security agents.
The next job offer I will accept needs to have free choice of OS. I work with Linux systems and Kubernetes only, no Winshit but I am forced to use this shitty piece of crap of software. It is slow,buggy and clumsy as hell - maybe because of all the corporate software stuff and GPOs, the only office tools I need are outlook and teams, no word or excel but you cannot remove all the other stuff afaik. Updating is hell because it is controlled by our IT department, sometimes my laptop needs 3 restarts or is stuck in a boot loop. Just let me support myself and let me install some Linux flavor. Don’t need any support from corporate it besides vpn connection. Really fuck companies forcing *nix guys using windows. I know that for sure now. Never again.
Generally I’ll see it used for POS type machines, or relegated to a backend database that gets logged into for parts lookup or something. Have I seen Jimbo in accounting rocking Gentoo on the company PC. Never.
I’ve ran across a few professors at nearby colleges using it. Last I remember was a nuclear physicists prof using opensuse.
Anecdotally and perhaps of interest, my current workplace uses a regular Dell PC running lightly customised 10-year-old OpenSUSE. It’s a UI control interface for a large machine
Because the machine’s expensive and production-critical, the PC isn’t allowed to be connected to any networks (security airgap). It’s sort of the antithesis of most corporate Linux usage: constantly online servers that do very little direct user interface
It’s staggeringly uncommon for the desktop side of things outside of machines running a specialty app or a particularly tech-savvy IT guy.
The issue is that Windows is just really good at centralized user management and policy control. You can do all those things in Linux too but it’s significantly more complicated and harder to manage.
Well, I wouldn’t really say that it’s used as a Windows replacement at the company I’m working at, because all the business stuff is still being done using Windows, but almost all developers are using Linux. I was even allowed to replace Ubuntu with Arch, because I was annoyed by outdated packages. Because of the higher freedom, I can even tolerate the slightly smaller pay rate and benefits that I could earn elsewhere.
At our office (and probably in many) the developers mostly use Linux and the other people often use windows for Microsoft stuff like Word, Excel, and other windows specific software. We can’t really choose, everyone is forced to use Linux for development so we all have a more or less the same environment
Munich’s city government switched to Linux for a few years as part of a push towards open source software.
There’s some programs like One Laptop per Child that donate laptops running Linux to education programs. I think Pine64 ended up donating a chunk of their base-level Pinebooks to some schools but I can’t find a blog post that states where they donated them to.
Well plenty of VMS in enterprise or corporate environments use Linux. Tenant appliances, User access gateways, DNS forwarders, web app servers in docker containers, maybe even some load balancers and siem appliances. For corporate Desktops however I’ve only really seen thin clients running Linux before sign in to windows VDI, and that gets phased out with Windows for IoT
From what I’ve heard, it’s more common in Europe and parts of Asia. I’ve personally never seen significant Linux use of any kind in the IT environments I work in, sadly.
It’s all Microsoft product stacks, the servers, the endpoints, the cloud environment, all MS. Sometimes their Hypervisor would be VMWare, and their NAS was a Synology. But other than that, basically all Microsoft garbage.
I did work at one place that had a fair bit of Linux infrastructure. The lead network architect was a hardcore Linux/FOSS grognard. Really smart guy and was fantastic at his job, I learned a lot from him. But the only reason that company had Linux servers and a few FOSS implementations was because that guy insisted on it and managed all of it himself.
I also worked at another place where one of the older IT guys had installed a handful of SUSE thin clients at various locations for employees to clock in with. But right after I started there, management wanted me to switch them out for Windows thin clients. I pushed back but they insisted, so there went the tiny bit of Linux at that company.
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