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.
I’m lucky enough to be in a company where Windows is banned by the CEO. Granted, there are 4 (I believe) exceptions, but the vast majority of employees have an Ubuntu workstation and everyone has a macbook. A bit of a shame this macbook thing, really. A 2 grand thin client to ssh into my desktop when working remotely :D
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
It depends. I’m working in the quant department of a bank and we work on pricing libraries that the traders then use. Since traders often use Excel and expect add-ins, we have a mostly Windows environment. Our head of CI, a huge Windows and Powershell fan, once then decided to add a few servers with Linux (RHEL) on them to have automated Valgrind checks and gcc/clang builds there to continuously test our builds for warnings, undefined behavior (gcc with O3 does catch a few of them) and stuff.
I thought cool, at least Linux is making it into this department. Then I logged into one of those servers.
The fucker didn’t like the default file system hierarchy and did stuff like /Applications and `/Temp’ and is installing programs by manually downloading binaries and extracting them there.
To be fair, the three-letter directories aren’t particularly intuitive. “Bin”? Like the “Recycle Bin”? Or is it short for “Binary” files? But isn’t everything on the computer stored in binary? Is “dev” for developers? Is “run” for running programs? Is “opt” for options? What is “ect” even for, files that can’t find another home? In Windows, the folder names make sense and have complete sentences like “Program Files” and “Users”. I can understand someone wanting to replicate the same thing on Linux.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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