I have reinstalled Ubuntu 22 today and I hate it. Only supported release (you can have derivates). And after that, Chrome is the only supported browser, Workspace One for maintenance, Carbon Black as spying blackbox. Evrything what makes Linux the best is crippled for me by incompetence of the admins. My loophole is that Guix is in distribution :)
Our software is officially supported on Windows and Linux. For some reason our chief product uses a Mac, so we support that unofficially. It can be quite a hassle to keep our code compatible on those platforms and Build Bot often gets angry when I open a pull request, but boy is it nice to be able to use whatever OS I like for development!
It's funny working at a company that doesn't allow Linux on a workstation, but is also actively developing and deploying tons of Linux-based products...
I think the real reason is that their MDM cant lock down a Linux machine the way it locks down a Windows or Mac machine...
My favorite bit was when the Microsoft rep sent a PDF explaining how much the company would save from tech support to the CFO, bypassing the CTO they were communicating with.
And the CFO shared the whole thing publicly for the entire company to laugh at.
Same here. Linux only shop. It is fairly awesome and part of the reason I'm staying. I've never worked at a company that managed the compromise between following security procedures required by customers and not pissing off their engineers this well.
It's simple, cost. Supporting multiple DE's is expensive. And provides little or no benefit to the company.
It may work at a small company with tech savvy users (like the ones commenting here). But ultimately at a normal large business, is nothing but a hassle that at best makes a few employees happy.
Those few employees are probably going to all be developers, and despite there being a bunch of mathematics and engineering involved, being a developer is very much a creative process. Similarly, I wouldn't begrudge a digital artist for wanting to use a Mac to do their work.
If a developer is asking for a thing, they're not asking for it because they've suddenly developed a nervous tic. There's typically a reason behind it. Maybe its because they want to learn that thing to stay relevant, or explore it's feasibility, or maybe it's to support another project.
I used to get the old "we don't support thing because nobody uses thing" a lot. The problem with that thinking is that unless support for whatever thing immaculates out of nowhere it'll just never happen. And that's a tough sell for a developer who needs to stay relevant.
I remember in like 2019 I asked for my company to host git repos on the corporate network, and I got a hard no. Same line, there wasn't a need, nobody uses git. I was astounded. I thought my request was pretty benign and would just sail right through because by that point it was almost an industry standard to use git. I vented about it to some devs in another department and learned that they had a system with local admin attached to the corporate network that somehow IT didn't know about. They were using that to host their repos.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if keeping employees happy is too expensive, then you gotta at least be aware of the potential costs of unhappy employees.
learned that they had a system with local admin attached to the corporate network that somehow IT didn't know about. They were using that to host their repos.
That's called shadow IT and is a huge security risk.
My last employer had several thousand employees. Some of the IT guys knew Linux, but it wasn't anywhere in the organization. I managed to convince them to let me install Linux on my desktop. They said sure, with the provision that I was not allowed to have a single issue. If I had an issue, they'd format it back. It was a fantastic last 8-9 years at work, as far as computer use went.
My usual reply to said employees is "if you know how to install and configure a Linux distro, you probably also know how to solve your own problems". Everything else is pretty much deployed over AD, so if you can get to the point where you need admin creds to hook to the DCs, then do whatever you like.
Eventually, all of them failed to even get close to being a part of the AD DC and that is where the story ended.
I work for a large company that issues Windows laptops or MacBooks to employees depending on the work requirements. Most developers I know there use Macs, and I've only heard of 1-2 cases where programmers needed to get a Windows machine because they were working on a particular project.
A long time ago I was required to use Windows. So I converted my computer using VMware P2V and just ran Windows in a VM. I swear it ran better and faster. Want really Linux freedom but it was fun.
My employer allows Linux - only a customized version of Fedora that's preconfigured to handle our environment, including certificates (802.1x, browser client certs, etc) with automated renewal, endpoint management software, deployment of settings using Chef, etc.
We have a few internal apps built using React Native though, which is only available on Windows and MacOS. There's been some Github repos trying to port React Native to Linux but nothing that's production-quality yet.
