I’m liking the recent posts about switching to Linux. Some of my home machines run Linux, and I ran it on my main laptop for years (currently on Win10, preparing to return to Linux again).
That’s all fine and dandy but at work I am forced to use Windows, Office, Teams, and all that. Not just because of corpo policies but also because of the apps we need to use.
Even if it weren’t for those applications, or those policies, or if Wine was a serious option, I would still need to work with hundreds of other people in a Windows world, live-sharing Excel and so on.
I’m guessing that most people here just accept it. We use what we want at home, and use what the bossman wants at work. Or we’re lucky to work in a shop that allows Linux. Right?
I pretty much have to use Linux at work. I’m only still on windows for gaming but that will probably change soon.
I’ve used Linux Desktop both personal and at work since 2003, I guess I got lucky with where I worked, they always allowed it as long as I could do everything that needed to be done.
Then again, I was either the owner or CTO level for the last decade or so, and just made those decisions myself.
Now I’m trying to push my current company to switch completely to Linux, and it ain’t easy. Not because of Linux, that part is fine and whatever easy, but because Microsoft worked hard to ensure you can’t escape their fucking clutches.
Moving away from teams, for example, will be a tough one, because most of our customers and government have complety relented to Microsoft, and you MUST use teams to talk to them.
So then what? Use different messengers internally and externally? I’m still not sure how to get rid of that part, but for the rest, we are going off the microshit soon
You can use Teams on Linux through the web browser.
This is true, but it’s one of the ways MS weasels it’s way in. If you’re using teams with clients, then they likely have Outlook as their scheduling app, so you have to use it too, since it only works with itself. It’s a backdoor to get you into their trap and get more and more of your data tied up and expensive to migrate.
Huh, I’ve never encountered this obstacle. On the rare occasion I’ve had to use Outlook, I’ve just used OWA.
I’m sorry for the challenges you’re facing.
I’m a MLOps engineer. Rules at my current company is that you need Windows or MacOS. According to the IT department it won’t work if you use Linux.
So I installed Linux anyway and everything is working perfectly. My manager don’t care that I use Linux but the IT department is not happy.
IT probably has tools to manage policy on Mac and Windows, but have not set anything up for Linux and as a result cannot manage your computer.
We can choose what we want to run at work. I work as with Solution Architecture and Platform Engineering mainly with Azure, PaaS and dotnet solutions. It’s atypical I suppose but surprisingly seamless.
Doing this in Linux is pretty straightforward and my choice of distro is Ubuntu since last year. I have modified Gnome getting it sorta close to Omakub (the precursor to Omarchy).
The stack, including Dotnet, C#, PowerShell, Bicep, Terraform and Azure CLI works well. I’m midway in my setup of Neovim and have it working with PowerShell and Bicep as well as an assortment of other LSP’s. Additional tools such as JetBrains Rider, Draw.io and Obsidian with Excalidraw are native and so is LibreOffice. For the few workloads I can’t run natively (basically Visual Studio and Office) I have a VM.
The major issue I have found in a lot of workplaces with Windows since forever, disregarding the increasing mess in Windows 11, has been group policy lockdowns. IT tend to look at everyone including devs as office workers (assuming Office is the most advanced tools needed), meaning no admin access and blocked apps.
that’s correct at least for me. My issue is that we have old lab equipment that needs absolutely ancient software and drivers to work correctly and I have to support that to an extent. Me personally, my job could be done within a web browser.
I’m curious: why don’t you virtualize? You can have any environment you want, you can run them on any machine, and are probably a lot easier to run backups etc. on.
The software support on some of our equipment is dubious at best and some of the instructors need to use it and most things are windows here. I would give it a shot if I was the lab supervisor but I’m not.
We have some gel cameras with an Olympus camera module. The last driver update for that brought Windows 7 support. We can get it running on 11 without too much issue.
I go around the problem by barely having to use a Computer at work. Pretty much the only thing I do with it is feed data into an online databank over a browser
I am the “IT guy” for a medium sized industrial company and i am currently using Bluefin on my work computer, preparing to roll it out for the rest of the company if tests go well… my boss is quiet open for the change and if our ERP system is further behaving well in its virtualized environment the big switch will perhaps happen somewhere in the middle of the next year.
I still have to figure out what to do about DATEV, but in the worst case our accounting department will be the only ones using Windows in the long run.
No idea how good whatever “Bluefin” is, but if their front page makes my computer lag much worse than actual videogames, it’s really not a good first impression.
Also, it seems to come with Gnome which is a bit further away in terms of user experience from Windows than the other choices like Plasma and Enlightenment, so I am not sure if whoever sits in them cubicles will get used to the lack of tray icons for example. Well, assuming they know what a tray icon is, but even if they don’t, they are gonna get a bigger “something’s off/missing” feeling than otherwise. And I am assuming nobody is using Windows 8 specifically, so it will take some time for people to get used to the excuse of a start menu Gnome has. Have to always be pessimistic about user’s intelligence and will to adapt.
We use the ThinkCentre M715q ( Ryzen 5 PRO 2400GE / 16 GB RAM) throughout the company (with only two exceptions) and on this hardware it is quiet nimble, even with a ton of rather heavy opened programs.
Regarding the acceptance… well, i think the difference in user interface of Gnome compared to Windows is rather a bonus, it is different enough to be recognized as something that has to be learned rather than invoking some “uncanny valley” effects. But we will see…
We’re a Linux shop at my work. We do have a windows PC due to corporate policies…but everything we do on our windows PCs we could do from Linux.
Outlook? Website. Excel? Website. Jira? Website. Teams? Website. Nearly everything we do front end wise is all web based. Which, I know electron sucks, but from a “Linux as a main desktop environment”…I’m pretty damn happy with everything being web based nowadays. It’s all OS agnostic.
with so many Windows programs being just PWAs these days, running everything in a browser is really no different anymore.
Yes, unfortunately
Was macos at work, now Linux dev machine. Its a big up.
To be honest, all those are web apps now shrug. Zoom, slack, teams, docs, sheets, <insert word named app here>, all open in the browser. So IDC what the OS is for them. Linux Zero-Touch deployments are still in progress IMHO so I get why they arent here yet for a lot offices, but we are closer now than ever (thanks atomic OSs!).
Yes, and I’m forced to bring Win11 home if I need to work remotely because they allegedly would need to install drivers (?) on and reconfigure their firewall for me to use the Linux Cisco VPN client? So it’s too much work.
I have a small homelab and I’ve never had to install drivers to support another operating system connecting. I also don’t have to pay a subscription for access points and can reconfigure them myself so maybe it’s a Cisco thing.
My main computer at work is Linux, I do have a Windows build box where I compile code for Windows, and to make my life easier I usually develop it there as well. But outside of platform specific code, or code related to a product that’s Windows only, I don’t have any issues.
As for other software Teams, slack, zoom, Google meeting and docs work well enough that I can use them daily without issues.
At a previous job for some reason they wanted me to use Windows, which was absurd since I worked on the backend of a site which would only be deployed to Linux, didn’t last long in that job after that was made official.
In short, as long as my main machine is Linux, I don’t mind having to have a Windows machine to do Windows stuff. But I get annoyed out of my mind if I’m either forced to use Windows as my main OS (it’s just not ergonomic for me), especially if there’s no reason for it.
I am working in company where about 35% of users are on Windows, 40% on Linux and 25% on Mac. In Linux, official way to use MS Office is web apps, but Libreoffice is quite heavily used too.
I’ve been lucky, at two of my previous jobs, I was permitted to use a Linux laptop instead of the default Windows ones, it was wonderful.
Sadly you’re right though, at least in the US, even in the IT world, unless you’re working specifically at a Linux company, you’re almost certainly using Windows.
My current job is all Windows, even though my team spends a significant amount of time maintaining Linux systems. I just open up WSL and try to pretend It’s running on bare metal. 😞
No. We are a proper engineering company.
So not an industrial automation engineer. Nothing but windows software.
Ignition for scada works on Linux, but nothing else does.
Lol what kind of engineering? Because it probably isn’t mechanical, electronics, or civil because most of those programs don’t work in Linux 😂
I have dreams of KiCAD and FreeCAD becoming good enough to be used a lot in industry and kiCAD is nearly there, but missing tons of productivity and collaboration features, but altium is still pretty ubiquitous, spaghetti code garbage that it can be.
As an engineer, piss off with this pretentious crap.
Thinkpads running Linux for the staff.
We use open-source. Our own on-prem servers running Linux. A lot of our software is also open source. Our git, our office suite, our video and chat… All open source.
We just got rid of our Google Cloud connections a few months ago, but we’re still reliant on aws, cloudflare, etc.
LOL, spotted the “windows engineer”.
Yeah, have fun making stuff when the device you’re using to do so is actively fighting you
