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.
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.
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.
We do know about stuff like this… we just decide to turn a blind eye about it since we know who is using it and why they’re using it.
But if things get out of hand and we notice weird things happening, then yes, we will act on it and will “know about it”.
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.
So this is def YMMV territory.
Cisco now supports developers running Linux feiw
Yes because developers don’t call tech support when they’ve accidentally deleted the Outlook icon from their desktop.
My current employer is a first for me:
- engineering essentially have to use Macs. Windows is accepted but not supported
- all products are built and hosted on Linux, both cloud and on-prem
Workstations/laptops at my current job in order of popularity: nixos, arch, macos. Windows is around 2%.
My solution is to host a virtual machine with my dev workstation, and use Windows or Mac for business admin stuff like email, slack, etc.
I work with data management / data brokering at a university. I am not allowed to have a Linux machine. I have to use a virtual environment.
I’ve had Linux 3 jobs in a row so I’ve been lucky that way, it usually helps to match production so that’s a good argument for it.
we not only allow it, we enforce it. windows not allowed in my company
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.
Same at my company.
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.
90% of my work is done in WSL anyways… I would much rather have KDE as my DE than Windows 11. Please Microsoft, if you love Linux so much now, port Office to it, and maybe my employer would be ok with it.
Office is a cloud application, didn’t you get memo?😵
$previous_job allowed us to pick. One of my coworkers had to replace his laptop, and I convinced him to try out Linux this time. I handed him the bootstrap script and he was back to working by the afternoon.
Our CEO got wind of this and said as a matter of policy everyone is switching to Linux unless they have a good reason (needing excel for financial reports is a good reason). The two new hires who had been setting up their dev environment for over a week at that point were the trigger for this.
keep spreading the good word!
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 :)
I don’t have windows allowed on my job, thanks god
The build team will not allow a single line of Windows code to infect their pipelines
But they’ll use Azure devops 🧠
I’m still surprised people still use the term sysadmin.
What term would you use?
Techwizard
I have always been partial to ‘sysop’ but I like sysadmin too.
nerd
SRE is what all the cool kids are saying these days
I miss the term sys admin.
Now it’s always something like “devops scrum hardware master” or some bullshit.
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I’m glad that I’ve never had to rely on windows at work. It’s been linux all the way even when it still had a lot of rough edges.
It was still way ahead of WfW or 95 though.
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We added a second disk and installed Linux on an encrypted partition. BIOS was not locked so we could dual boot.
When we return the machines we remove the disk.
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!
