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.
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.
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.
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 Desktop 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.
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.
Yes. At one employer, we had an entire domain in our AD forest that was Red Hat / CentOS / Ubuntu workstations for the developers.
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.
we can decide ourselfs if we want mac, windows or ubuntu (no other distro allowed). Our code runs in docker containers and except for the IDE our tools are web-based for the most part anyway, so it doesn’t really matter which OS you use. though I heard there were quite a few issues with docker and Mac when the first M-chip Macs were used. it’s a software company in Germany with ~150 people.
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.
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.
I Sysadmin in education here in Brisbane. Half our server stack is Linux on a Nutanix hypervisor. I do all my work from Linux, my junior admin recently moved his workstation to Fedora KDE, I use Kinoite.
The student and staff devices are 95% Windows, manager doesn’t care what we use to administer. Officially we’re a “Microsoft School”
It’s sad you don’t teach students about Linux instead because Windows is getting worse and it’s pretty bad already.
I just build what they need, networks, auth, security etc -I’ll leave teaching to the teachers
google and nvidia both do.
i don’t know if it’s still true; but they gave their employees 2 computers where their workstations were usually linux and their laptops were either linux or mac if they were engineers. it was their choice to decide what to get; but they usually went along with whatever their peers where using; except for non-engineers who always wanted macs no matter what, even if their windows machines were newer and better by miles.
I work for a web host (UK based). We’re entirely WFH so as long as you can support it yourself you can use it. They don’t care what Distro we use.
I work for a very small company. We do embedded development. They gave me a Windows machine. After a few months I ditched Windows for GNU/Linux and after a couple years the other two fellow developers followed suit.