What do y’all think? Does switching to Linux as an entire corporation mean RedHat? Or could it be done on a distro like Debian?

  • Corporation: Yo can you add a button so I can see all my employees’ screenshots? And maybe get like a little report of what % of the day they’re spending on doing exactly what they’re told? And then like an automated email to HR and their manager if it drops below a threshold…

  • No

    Look at the VMware Broadcom merger. The price went way up and companies paid it anyway. However some did switch to the cloud or some other hypervisor.

    Also the Linux desktop isn’t geared as much towards the enterprise. It isn’t easy to lock down and the vast amount of options is a blessing and a curse.

  • Chances are that many large entities are in too deep. It’s what Microsoft were counting on before the backlash, and now they’re probably going to do it by stealth instead.

    If I have to use Windows, I want the configuration of Windows that will run on the computers at a country’s top intelligence agencies.

    Because sure as hell those places will have it locked down and not sending one solitary thing back to Microsoft, whether they have to configure it themselves or put the fear of the unholy into Microsoft to get that to happen.

    And if not that, the configuration that Bill Gates or Mark “I put tape over my webcam and deactivate my mic for no particular reason” Zuckerberg will use.

  •  Nougat   ( @Nougat@fedia.io ) 
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    23 days ago

    No.

    If you’re talking about desktops, there is a huge cost involved in switching to an entirely new operating system. I’m not just talking about “How do you get it installed and configured on n laptops for users to then use?” Those users will require training in order to use it - and allllll of the new and different applications that run on that new operating system. (Users are mainly just button pressers, and when you change the buttons …) The alternative to the above would simply be to disable Recall via group policy. Done and done.

    If you’re talking about migrating Active Directory to some Linux LDAP centralized authentication, that’s going to introduce a whole lot of other complications. Not impossible, no, but it would be a very long, time-consuming, and costly process.

    If you’re talking about servers, you surely know that lots of companies run Linux servers on the back end. When you’re using Windows servers, there’s a reason. You want/need to use MS SQL, or Exchange on premise, or SharePoint on premise, for example. Are there other mail servers, database servers, collaboration servers? Sure - but again, switching from an existing platform to a different platform is costly.

    These transition costs get exponentially higher when you consider whether companies actually have the in-house expertise to be able to pull off such a thing (Narrator: They don’t.)

  • Many companies are still using Windows 7 machines or 2008 win servers, without MS17-010 patch. They don’t really care about security that much, when it’s inconvenient or slightly difficult to mitigate. They won’t be switching entire architecture just for a few screenshots

  • Depends on a number of factors. A ton of companies have moved to web based tools for a big chunk of their workforce. If those web apps are more or less standards-compliant you could pull it off with minimal retraining.

  • I have not the slightest idea why companies use Red Hat. When people think this is how Linux is, no wonder they think Linux sucks.

    I have to use Red Hat and I cannot stop thinking about how much more professional Debian appears to me. They can at least make decent packages that work properly.

    • First-mover advantage, combined with a long tail of support and the cost of migrating to a new platform.

      RedHat was, for a VERY long time, the only real commercially supported Linux with SLAs and long-term roadmaps and backported security patches: and yes, Debian does those, but they don’t offer any sort of guarantees that corpo management types really really like.

      • From my experience, I’ll rather pay for a Linux consultant than for regular commercial support. They give me solid results and join my teams when they have something to do. And consultants seem to prefer Debian-based distributions, when I ask them directly.

      • It was also one of the only (that I can remember aside from maybe SUSE - maaaybe Slack?) actually putting their distro in stores back in the 90s. I was a middle schooler and used Christmas money to buy RedHat at Best Buy (I had no idea what I was doing) because I thought it was the distro to get. I can’t remember a single other distro more synonymously associated with Linux than RedHat because they were marketed hard and were widely available for purchase which I’m guessing made them at least appear more legitimate to new Linux consumer and business adopters.

        • SuSE was kinda in some retail stores but mostly only really the ones that were mostly exclusively computer-related (at least in the states). But RedHat was EVERYWHERE: book stores, computer stores, electronics stores, and hell even my college bookstore had it.

          They really did make impressive inroads in selling Linux, even if they did decide to bail out after 9 and moved from consumer to corporate focused.

      • That’s not as much of a deciding factor as you might think. Enterprise laptops are stupidly overpriced; I wouldn’t be surprised if buying Macs didn’t actually save the average corporation money.

        The real cost is in the support contract, and any CIO or senior manager knows this. The trick is finding a company to provide Mac hardware support at an enterprise level. None of this going into a Genius Bar and standing around for an hour until an employee deigns to notice you; they want a telephone number they can call, get someone 24/7 (or some proximity thereof), and get someone to come over and fix the CEO’s laptop when the battery swells up. Or, more probably, when they run a diagnostic and find out it’s bad memory, or whatever - they want to be able to swap out hardware on a call, and have a rotating upgrade plan, and all that shizzle.

        The cost of the laptops is almost incidental.

      •  nick   ( @nick@midwest.social ) 
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        23 days ago

        Except that every company I’ve ever worked for (6 now) in Silicon Valley DOES provide top tier MacBook pros for devs.

        My current laptop is an m3 with 64gb of ram.