Basically title. Do you know of any companies that use desktop Linux?
I can think of two in my area in Brisbane - Adfinis and Red Hat. Both have a pretty small presence here from what I last heard (several employees each).
My employer allows the Linux team to use Linux but it’s discouraged and our lives are made somewhat difficult.
Local here. We all use Linux desktop. Libre office. Gimp. Krita. Inkscape. Vscodium. Thunderbird. Sublime. Etc etc. We have a programmer who favoured Windows. We finally converted him. Now we only have the mac laptop to deal with having to do osx builds.
When I was at Driver’s Village, a fairly large dealership in central New York, I noticed the salesman was using a computer with wallpaper that said Windows 11. This was before Windows 11 was even released. It was very obviously a Gnome desktop. I’m guessing IT just put the windows 11 background on it so the people using it wouldn’t complain that they didn’t know how to use Linux.
This is hilarious.
How well did it work?
The salesman I was dealing with seemed to have no trouble using it, but all he was doing was using a web browser and some database access.
What do you use for database access?
I didn’t work there. I was a customer. I didn’t know what they were using. I didn’t recognize the interface, I just barely know enough about databases to recognize that’s what he was doing.
We have both Linux and Windows machines in my team. We do all the work in Linux, and register hours in Windows. We also all have iPhones that we only use for 2FA.
We also all have iPhones that we only use for 2FA.
That’s some expenses right there.
register hours in Windows. We also all have iPhones that we only use for 2FA.
Without background information that sounds kind of insane. Switching to alternative time tracking software and getting YubiKeys or alternatives instead for 2FA would’ve saved so much money as well as time every day.
I’m assuming they meant that they were company phones, and that additionally they were required for any work related MFA requirements.
If that’s the case, it would be YubiKey in addition to, not instead of.
As for the time tracking software, those are often part of a much larger accounting, payroll, and/or HR software suite. Having his team spin up Windows vms, or even have separate older windows boxes somewhere, probably makes more financial sense than not. At least, until they can switch to a more modern suite that has a web portal.
I opened up the floodgates at my office dedicating support for anyone wanting to. All our servers and production are Linux so probably 1/4 of the staff is cli literate.
So far it’s me with NixOS and one other guy running Debian.
Half the remaining use WSL.
This is why Microsoft made WSL, they knew they were losing ground big time amongst devs.
I’ve loved WSL. I’ve been able to throw an Ubuntu CLI in front of 30 devs that had almost no Linux experience. I’ve got them scripting and doing service control. The ssh terminal is reasonable, they can use standard openssh pems. The only real problem is the VM doesn’t play with cisco well so they can’t easily VPN and use the VPN sesh in WSL. I have workarounds, but they’re kinda crappy.
I work for a company in Texas, USA. We actively discourage Windows being used in our organization and push people to use macOS or Linux.
I’m kinda of the opinion windows is just the pointless middle ground between Mac and Linux, to my knowledge the only advantage it has left nowadays is active directory
That said it prevents apple from getting a monopoly on the pc market I guess
Wow. I don’t think I’ve seen a dumber take than “Windows good because it prevents an Apple monopoly” in a long while.
Where I work,~2,000 employees and contractors, I’m almost certain I’m the one person using Linux (Fedora) and refusing to use Windows (so they deployed a cloud Windows 365 instance for me to have access to the in-house platform).
I’m blessed to hold a position for which the company would have a really hard time replacing me, I think that’s why they haven’t booted me (chances are they will at some point, but I don’t care anymore).
It still blows my mind how the IT team tries to justify being locked into Microsoft, and then telling me I could potentially become a point of vulnerability, when my system is easily the most secure in the whole company and my habits make for little to no possibility of ever exposing anything outside of the company.
how the IT team tries to justify being locked into Microsoft, and then telling me I could potentially become a point of vulnerability
Because they can manage and control all the windows PCs , pushing updates automatically, restricting what users can do locally and on the network, they have monitoring tools and whatever antivirus and antimalware tools they have, and are able to easily manage and deploy/remove software and associated group licensing and so on and so forth.
Meanwhile you’re a single user of unknown (to them) capabilities that they now have to trust with the rest of their system, basically.
The first rule of corporate IT is, “control what’s on your network”. Your PC is their concern still, but they have no effective control over it. That’s why they’re being a bit of a pain in the ass about it.
What’s wild to me is Linux systems can offer better lockdowns than Windows.
Its just vendor lock and their CTOs are at fault to me
Yeah, I get the philosophy behind their actions and intent. They can audit that cloud PC all they want. In my computer, I’m lord, god and king, nobody gets to see what happens there but me and those I want to.
Yep, and to the person justifying the IT department’s invasion of privacy: they’ve been lying to us for years, there are breaches ALL THE TIME. Workers will give up every right in the face of corporate excuses? 🤷♂️
So they are gaslighting to cause you to have doubts. So they are using a psyche which is a symptom of them having unrestricted access to your time and ears
They have tried everything. They do get an A for effort though.
Hostpoint, one of the largest hosting companies of Switzerland uses Linux Clients.
In 3 of my last 4 jobs as developer I could use Linux as desktop. The 1 exception did not have the admins that could think ahead of what Amazon or Microsoft has told them. They where also struggling with other ‘modern’ ideas.
Maybe a German thing, but Linux for a dev is quite common here.
400 staff German state institution, Windows desktops are standard, but you can get a supported and standardized Linux Mint installation provided by IT on your personal computer upon request. A few dozen people do. We also provide some 150 publicly accessible PCs for research in or brach locations, all of which are Mint as well. And IT staff is allowed to install any system on their hardware they want, no questions asked; many run Linuxes. Linuces. Linnixees.
Lineés. Linacea. Linii.
In my team we use both Linux and Mac (I don’t want to disclose my company, but it’s in Sweden). IT isn’t entirely happy about some of us using Linux because it’s more difficult for them to administer the computers (i.e. install spyware), but so far they’ve been unsuccessful in making us switch.
I wish my employer (state government) would use Linux. But unfortunately, they are all in with Microsoft. Everything has gone that way. SharePoint, Microsoft hosted Exchange, OneDrive, etc… And it’s as horrible as you can imagine. It’s awesome when I can’t access my personal files because Microsoft servers are down. And don’t get me started on the CrowdStrike fiasco!
That sucks :( I’m pretty much in the same boat. I get to use a Linux desktop at work on the proviso that I don’t raise support requests. We use Microsoft for nearly everything so naturally it’s an uphill battle. The web UI is quite buggy and “not recommended” by my org. Teams doesn’t support Firefox so I have to run a separate browser especially for it.
But aside from interfacing with Microsoft everything just works, and really nicely.
Teams as a PWA installed via edge seems to be the best way to make management happy enough and works better than the windows client sometimes
When I was working for Averitt Express, a trucking company out of Cookeville, Tn, our yard trucks had computers in them (for yard and dock management) that ran Ubuntu. This was 10ish years ago.
That’s awesome - great to hear about Linux desktops bring used by non-techies especially in a company.
How was it received out of interest?
They didn’t care. You know non tech folk, they don’t care so long as it works. If you’re lucky, they know enough to hit the button with the power symbol to turn it on, but make sure you have step by step instructions printed out for those that can’t figure it out. I wish that was sarcasm.
In our location it was mostly used for passive tracking of equipment via a scanner on the roof of the truck and tags on the trailers and we didn’t use the software much beyond that. From what I saw of it, it was some native custom application. Used the default Gnome interface and design scheme of the time. Looked to be pretty idiot proof.
In my experience, the larger the company, the more likely they are to force you to use Windows. The smaller companies will be more relaxed about the whole thing.
The largest company I’ve worked for that allows Linux had a staff count of hundreds of engineers and hundreds more non-nerds. In their case though, the laptops were crippled with Crowdstrike and Kollide and while the tech team was working hard to support us, we were always aware that we made up around 1% of the machines they manage and represented a big chunk of their headaches.
The response to this you usually hear (from me even) is that “I don’t need support, I know what I’m doing”. Which is probably true, but the vast majority of problems is in dealing with access to proprietary systems, failures from Crowdstrike or complaints about kernel versions etc.
TL;DR: work at a small company (<100 staff) and they’ll probably leave you alone. Go bigger and you’ll be stuck fighting IT in one way or another.
Yes. At one employer, we had an entire domain in our AD forest that was Red Hat / CentOS / Ubuntu workstations for the developers.
I work for a major network infrastructure company. We can choose from Windows, macOS, or Ubuntu for work laptops. I chose macOS, but I’m probably going to switch to Ubuntu with my next laptop refresh since a lot of our internal tooling works better on Linux.
