I use Linux at the office. I’m the only employee at my company who does.
I haven’t had many issues collaborating with others using libreoffice while they use MS office. I do keep a Windows VM running for those somewhat rare instances where I need Windows for something though. I also needed to invest quite some time to figure out Linux alternatives for everything (how to use company VPN, how to get MS Teams working, how to connect to network drives, etc).
But so far so good. Been 100% Linux at work for maybe ~1.5 years?
And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.
Big corporations initially providing exceptional services based on FOSS and after a while use their market share to excert undue control about the system (see e.g. RedHat, Ubuntu, Chrome, Android, …)
Big corporations taking FLOSS, rebranding it and hiding it below their frontend, so that nobody can interact with or directly use the FLOSS part (e.g. iOS, any car manufacturer, …)
Big and small companies just using GPL (or similar) software and not sharing their modifications when asked (e.g. basically any embedded systems, many Android manufacturers, RedHat, …)
Big corporations using infrastructure FOSS without giving anything back (e.g. OpenSSL, which before Heartbleed was developed and maintained by a single guy with barely enough funding to stay alive, while it was used by millions of projects with a combined user base of billions of users)
The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.
And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.
Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.
I just use Super+p to run commands. Awesome and custom keybidings are to easily move between tags, windows and monitors, not to launch programs. I use nvim for coding and this combined with awesome means I can do a lot without touching my mouse. At work I use Cinnamon and IntelliJ tools and it’s just less ergonomic. Not a huge difference but I definitely prefer my home setup. In general all Linux WM I used over the years were easy to configure and get good experience. The worst environment I had to ever use was OS X. I just hated all their weir solutions like the launch bar and the common menu bar on top. On Linux I never had any issues.
Yeah, you don’t have to remove it (I didn’t when I tried this 10 years ago) but if you don’t you always have to hit ctrl+l when it boots, or it could get stuck looking for ChromeOS. The hardware is so old now, I don’t really care if I brick it. I’m just learning about linux by goofin.
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.
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.
fun tip, if you have a samba share and your devices are in the same network, use a file manager that can connect to local network (like explorer by speed software), and transfer your files wirelessly. it seems to be equally fast too, i haven’t used a cable for ages except for killing updaters and bloatware with adb.
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.
My solution that took awhile to figure out is fantastic IMO. Docker containers unprivileged, with nobody permissions, with their own IPs on macvlan, with matching vlan and good firewall rules. A docker network proxy container, Traefik, Authelia, CrowdSec, and a CrowdSec Traefik Bouncer containers.
I don't have any experience with Tuxedo or Framework, so I can't really comment on those 😅
I have definitely heard Lenovo ThinkPads are great though, and I'm currently rocking a Lenovo Legion Slim 7 which has been fantastic so far (albeit I JUST got it and I'm rolling Windows on it with WSL2 Debian, so not exactly a pure Linux experience).
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