I made this post because I am really curious if Linux is used in offices and educational centres like schools.

While we all know Windows is the mac-daddy in the business space, are there any businesses you know or workplaces that actually Linux as a business replacement for Windows?

I.e. Mint or Ubuntu, I am not strictly talking about the server side of things.

  • @[email protected]
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    61 year ago

    In Europe, there are companies that allow devs to use whatever they like (worked for some of those). Linux is more popular among devs than mac, but less popular than windows. I even have a friend working at a company that’s 100% opensource, much to their chagrin as GIMP and Inkscape are no Photoshop.

    Linux at school might become more of a thing in Germany as Microsoft 365 office online (or whatever it’s called) is in a dangerous spot where it might be banned from schools. IIRC nextcloud and owncloud are positioning themselves to replace it and with that, maybe linux on the desktop might be considered. But since they have a problem with “Apple ambassadors” (aka teachers prostituting themselves for Apple), the real danger exists that schools will be more willing to spend money on fancy mac bullshit than linux. Only time will tell.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce
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    21 year ago

    From what I’ve heard, it’s more common in Europe and parts of Asia. I’ve personally never seen significant Linux use of any kind in the IT environments I work in, sadly.

    It’s all Microsoft product stacks, the servers, the endpoints, the cloud environment, all MS. Sometimes their Hypervisor would be VMWare, and their NAS was a Synology. But other than that, basically all Microsoft garbage.

    I did work at one place that had a fair bit of Linux infrastructure. The lead network architect was a hardcore Linux/FOSS grognard. Really smart guy and was fantastic at his job, I learned a lot from him. But the only reason that company had Linux servers and a few FOSS implementations was because that guy insisted on it and managed all of it himself.

    I also worked at another place where one of the older IT guys had installed a handful of SUSE thin clients at various locations for employees to clock in with. But right after I started there, management wanted me to switch them out for Windows thin clients. I pushed back but they insisted, so there went the tiny bit of Linux at that company.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 year ago

    It’s staggeringly uncommon for the desktop side of things outside of machines running a specialty app or a particularly tech-savvy IT guy.

    The issue is that Windows is just really good at centralized user management and policy control. You can do all those things in Linux too but it’s significantly more complicated and harder to manage.

  • vojel
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    11 year ago

    The next job offer I will accept needs to have free choice of OS. I work with Linux systems and Kubernetes only, no Winshit but I am forced to use this shitty piece of crap of software. It is slow,buggy and clumsy as hell - maybe because of all the corporate software stuff and GPOs, the only office tools I need are outlook and teams, no word or excel but you cannot remove all the other stuff afaik. Updating is hell because it is controlled by our IT department, sometimes my laptop needs 3 restarts or is stuck in a boot loop. Just let me support myself and let me install some Linux flavor. Don’t need any support from corporate it besides vpn connection. Really fuck companies forcing *nix guys using windows. I know that for sure now. Never again.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 year ago

    While I’m told such places exist, I have yet to knowingly interact with a business officially doing this for employee computers.

  • Kanedias
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    51 year ago

    We spent 1 year negotiating implementation of secure Linux workstation, and now after endless meetings and agreements I can proudly say we have 5 people with fully GNU/Linux laptops! Dell XPS, to be precise.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      Nice! We are looking into it with my boss and one other colleague. Im really hoping it goes through and I can finally use Linux at work!

  • @[email protected]
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    11 year ago

    My university dual booted Windows 10 and Ubuntu (science department computer labs only)

    All the other departments just had Windows 10, except for Engineering, which used Windows 7 for some fucking reason. I hope I’m remembering wrong.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 year ago

    At my current job, our department (DevOps), uses Linux (arch). A couple of devs too (Ubuntu), the rest use a mix of Macs and Windows. The Online versions of Office work just fine, there is Teams, Azure login and even Intune for Linux now.

    At my previous job, most of the company used Windows, but the devs were using 90% Linux (Ubuntu), some of them with 2 machines (laptop and workstation with GPU, point cloud stuff). Ah, the good ole days of Ubuntu 16 and Nvidia drivers 🥲

    The job before that, a very small company, mostly devs, we were using half Windows, half Linux (mint).

    This is Germany btw.

  • @[email protected]
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    51 year ago

    In two of my previous jobs (I’m a software engineer) I could officially install any Linux distro to the company laptop (which I did of course) fully replacing the wintoys. Could use the machine as I liked, no corporate mandated BS spyware or anything. On of the provides a SaaS product and used Linux server/virtual machines. Otherwise it was mostly MS bits + sprinkle a little Atlanssian horrors to it.

    Unfortunately in my current job I’m limited a VirtualBox Linux running a corporate restricted wintoys machine in a MS environment. A long for the days when I was more productive with my Linux installation.

    It’s just sad and funny how corporate world is that MS products it has to be (because reasons).

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      I was stuck in MacOS hell for some time. Now I won’t accept jobs that mandate an OS for devs. It’s either free choice, or I’m gone. Fuck that noise.

      Was also in a company where Linux in a VM was the only option because it was a windows shop. Glad I quit that.

      May the virtualized penguin bestow you with strength!

      CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      i’m stuck with windows, but i moved everything inside WSL… so at least vscode it’s on Linux.

      i’m a heavy multitasker used to tiling WMs, multiple desktops on windows is torture.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      I could officially install any Linux distro to the company laptop (which I did of course) fully replacing the wintoys. Could use the machine as I liked, no corporate mandated BS spyware or anything.

      Yes, and when the company gets hacked they can sue you for not keeping “your” computer secure enough. When I started my career on the field I also had those ideias that companies are evil and want to spy on everyone and enforce stupid policies on computer and whatnot.

      Eventually I moved to heavily restricted environments where once you see what’s going on there you simply wouldn’t even open WhatsApp on that machine, let alone surf unknown websites. You wouldn’t do it not because the fear of being monitored but by the amount of liability you would be exposing yourself if you did. Trust me, the company isn’t bad, predatory but at a certain level you simply think twice. In fact they even reconize that people might want to surf random websites or use some personal accounts and provide a secure virtualized extra browser (restricted from the internal network) but still no way in hell people even think about using it for something so simple such as WhatsApp.

      To be fair, this way of thinking might be the best. Just assume people will want to have a personal messaging app, email or whatever on the side and deploy some virtualized / restricted local or remote solution so they can do it without creating risks for themselves or to the company. At least this way you’re still under control and people wouldn’t be trying to bypass your security everyday…

  • @[email protected]
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    11 year ago

    This might be cheating a bit since I am a computer science student, but we have Linux servers we can access for classes, and our university library has a maker space that has some computers running Ubuntu in it.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 year ago

    Depends. Lots of universities have Linux and Windows computers.

    Most companies use Windows, some also Mac and Linux.

    I’m alwasys fascinated by IT people who manage a fleet of Linux servers and containers, but sit in front of a Windows PC. 😃

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    When I worked in VFX it was mostly Scientific Linux. A few macs were around for concept artists using Photoshop, and editorial using a proprietary video codec with Final Cut. Most business folks (in vfx called “coordinators” and “producers”) used tools that were web-based and cross platform (for example, Autodesk Shotgrid, Confluence, and Jira). A lot of internal development is done in Python so no worries there, either.

    In game dev unfortunately it’s exclusively Windows. If you bring up even using os.path.join, instead of hardcoding \\ into paths, devs who have never worked in another OS look at you like some sort of paranoid maniac.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    25 years ago I worked at a university computer lab that was Windows-heavy because Dell wouldn’t stop donating PCs. However we didn’t have enough UNIX workstations as we had to pay for Sun / HP / IBM out of pocket. Converting them to Linux workstations would be nice because the Dells had more grunt than the aging RISC workstations.

    I proposed to switch a few desks worth to Debian and was given the go-ahead. After a few days learning how to preseed an installation image and getting a PXE server going I had 8 machines running CDE just like the AIX and HP/UX boxes. Users that didn’t need one of the commercial engineering applications tied to one OS or another didn’t notice any difference between the free (now as in both speech and beer) Dells and the proprietary workstations.

    A couple of months after we got the pilot rolling, the university’s IT director came to check it out and told me we’re on the “lunatic fringe” for deploying an OS developed by volunteers, but otherwise offered approval as long as we could maintain security and availability.

    Now every student in our local school district gets issued a Chromebook running Linux under the hood. Who’s the lunatic now?

  • GrappleHat
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    01 year ago

    I use Linux at the office. I’m the only employee at my company who does.

    I haven’t had many issues collaborating with others using libreoffice while they use MS office. I do keep a Windows VM running for those somewhat rare instances where I need Windows for something though. I also needed to invest quite some time to figure out Linux alternatives for everything (how to use company VPN, how to get MS Teams working, how to connect to network drives, etc).

    But so far so good. Been 100% Linux at work for maybe ~1.5 years?

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      you should keep a list and tell management how much software costs youre saving and how that can be scaled for every employee

  • RachelRodent
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    51 year ago

    Don’t be so humble. You know, I started out exactly where you are, and to be honest, you know, my heart is still there. So I see you’re running Gnome. You know, I’m actually on KDE myself. I know this desktop environment is supposed to be better but you know what they say. Old habits they die hard. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. I’m an executive. I mean why am I even running Linux? Again old habits. It’s gonna be fun working with you. I should join the rest of the group. Bonsoir, Elliot.