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.
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.
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.
At my current job, our department (DevOps), uses Linux (arch). A couple of devs too (Ubuntu), the rest use a mix of Macs and Windows. The Online versions of Office work just fine, there is Teams, Azure login and even Intune for Linux now.
At my previous job, most of the company used Windows, but the devs were using 90% Linux (Ubuntu), some of them with 2 machines (laptop and workstation with GPU, point cloud stuff). Ah, the good ole days of Ubuntu 16 and Nvidia drivers 🥲
The job before that, a very small company, mostly devs, we were using half Windows, half Linux (mint).
I mean, it still wants edge, which is okay for the online office stuff (SSO), but it’s pretty bare, when compared to Windows. No policies and stuff. Install it and forget it situation, mostly used for reporting. Ah, we also use defender for endpoint, on all 3 oses, which is rather decent.
We spent 1 year negotiating implementation of secure Linux workstation, and now after endless meetings and agreements I can proudly say we have 5 people with fully GNU/Linux laptops! Dell XPS, to be precise.
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.
Any web hosting company will use Linux for all servers, and many developers will use it as their workstation as they tire of kludging together dev environments in windows. The devops engineers will most certainly be on Linux as that is where their tool chains live.
There are government agencies that use Linux exclusively. The DoD used to have a mandate to use oss. I’m not sure if it is still the case.
There was an interview with Dreamworks ( i think that was the Animation house) they use linux for everything.
In engineering CAD and large manufacturing corporations RHEL and SUSE are the two certified distros for running Teamcenter Product Lifecycle Management softare and Siemens NX CAD/CAM/FEA software (up to version 12) it is a smaller market than Windows versions, but probably took the place of the original unix versions prior to 2000
what kinds of tech jobs allow workers to choose what OS they use? where I live it seems most tech jobs won’t even let you install you your own software preferences unless its on their approved list, let alone install your own OS. they’re too worried about company security and IT’s ability to manage the hardware
I work in threat detection research, and since most of what I’m looking at is people trying to get frisky with a Linux server my job is fine with using Linux for our work computers
Dev jobs and data scientists often get a lot of leeway.
Very big tech companies tend to be more open to it. When I was at AWS their threat model was basically to treat every end user device as untrusted, which then meant that they didn’t rely on keeping laptops locked down for security.
Don’t be so humble. You know, I started out exactly where you are, and to be honest, you know, my heart is still there. So I see you’re running Gnome. You know, I’m actually on KDE myself. I know this desktop environment is supposed to be better but you know what they say. Old habits they die hard. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. I’m an executive. I mean why am I even running Linux? Again old habits. It’s gonna be fun working with you. I should join the rest of the group. Bonsoir, Elliot.
25 years ago I worked at a university computer lab that was Windows-heavy because Dell wouldn’t stop donating PCs. However we didn’t have enough UNIX workstations as we had to pay for Sun / HP / IBM out of pocket. Converting them to Linux workstations would be nice because the Dells had more grunt than the aging RISC workstations.
I proposed to switch a few desks worth to Debian and was given the go-ahead. After a few days learning how to preseed an installation image and getting a PXE server going I had 8 machines running CDE just like the AIX and HP/UX boxes. Users that didn’t need one of the commercial engineering applications tied to one OS or another didn’t notice any difference between the free (now as in both speech and beer) Dells and the proprietary workstations.
A couple of months after we got the pilot rolling, the university’s IT director came to check it out and told me we’re on the “lunatic fringe” for deploying an OS developed by volunteers, but otherwise offered approval as long as we could maintain security and availability.
Now every student in our local school district gets issued a Chromebook running Linux under the hood. Who’s the lunatic now?
I know some schools in my country use their own linux distribution on pair with windows. And my organization has also their own linux distribution but it is barely used really. I dont know anyone who uses it, but I do know it exists.
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