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?
Yes. Its their network and their systems and they pay me to use their tools. Thats the only reason i touch windows.
My last job was with a startup and they let me pick my rig. I went native linux and they all thought i was looney. 3 months later i had converted 2 coworkers to use ubuntu.
Yeah, I only use that hot mess of an OS when I get paid to use it lmao
sure am and it fucking sucks
just today I ran into a new issue - when you try to close an Excel document without saving, it asks if you want to merge your changes with the server.
I do not, I want to close without saving, so I choose no.
then it asks if I want to save the document.
I do not, I want to close without saving, so I choose don’t save
The document finally closes. I reopen the document, and guess what’s there? my unsaved changes. if I try to close the document, the cycle repeats.
Microsoft fucking removed the ability to close a document without saving
I tried this on Windows 10 on one computer and Windows 11 on another computer with the exact same behavior
Yep, and I fucking hate every minute of it…
Yes, but maybe it’s not so bad. It creates a clear separation between work and play. Windows is for boring work and office stuff. Linux is the happy place at home.
Nope: My lathe runs Linux.
My job involves maintaining Linux servers so there are no problems with Linux as my desktop.
Currently Arch Linux as the desktop OS.
Mac at work. Yabai+sketchybar is no i3wm replacement, but it works ok.
My
.zshrcis basically the same as I use on my personal computers, and aside from a few coreutils differences it…kinda just works. I haveaptaliased tobrewso I can feel more at home.Stock terminal works fine—I use
xtermon Linux, so I’m used to relying ontmuxfor nice features anyway.Basically, I miss the window manager, but practically speaking that’s a about it. (I obviously have
xscreensaverinstalled!)I pretty much have to use Linux at work. I’m only still on windows for gaming but that will probably change soon.
If you have an AMD GPU and don’t care about playing games that require kernel-level access for anticheat (ew), then Linux might just work better for you than Windows, for most games.
Like, getting Minecraft installed and working with mods in CachyOS just required installing Prism Launcher from the CachyOS repos (1 easy step) then launching it. I didn’t even need to open a web browser to download an installer.
Heroic Launcher is amaze balls, too. It pulls all the free games I get on GOG, Epic, and Amazon (iirc?) into one library that looks and works like Steam’s (amazing) library. So slick. (I think it’s preinstalled in CachyOS, too.)
I have an older 1080ti or something like that which is still running just fine. And with the current prices I’m unlikely to change that.
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.
I’m in a lot of the same landscape as you, currently running a mac but ubuntu/fedora with gnome is looking at me from behind the corner. What’s blocking me at this time is client IT policies, in order to access stuff in their network it has to be their device and they don’t ship linux so. Next year it is.
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 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…
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
