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.
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’ve noticed that some “mobility” startups are using Linux. E.g. companies working on electric or automated vehicles.
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Yes. At one employer, we had an entire domain in our AD forest that was Red Hat / CentOS / Ubuntu workstations for the developers.
Opengear in Brisbane; development teams often use Linux.
In the US, a lot of Lowes Hardware Stores use Linux on their employee computers. Most movie theater projectors are running CentOS, and most movies that come in on hard drives are formatted to Ext2.
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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”
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I just build what they need, networks, auth, security etc -I’ll leave teaching to the teachers
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.
Journeys (the shoe chain) and Hollister Co. both use Linux distros on their point of sale machines. Hollister’s machines are pretty locked down and can basically only run the RPoS software, but a lot of Journeys’ software is browser-based, so they have to be a bit more capable.
Pretty sure they’re both custom distros, though.
Hostpoint, one of the largest hosting companies of Switzerland uses Linux Desktop Clients.
Is there a law that prevents employers from docking someone’s salary by the expensive proprietary software you opt-in for, instead of using a free option?
What? No genuinely which company is docking employees for using unfree software. If anything it’s the opposite.
I don’t know of any, but I’d like to see it.
“Want to use Windows and Office? Here’s the bill.”
That would genuinely make sense though, proprietary software (especially paid proprietary software) costs more money for any company then open source software. Windows needs more maintenance then an ultra stable Linux distro like Debian or even an LTS release of Ubuntu or Fedora. Meanwhile Microshaft ensures that any document made with office doesn’t look the same unless it’s viewed with office.
No, it doesn’t, because the cost of that software is on the business because it makes them money. This person is literally smoking crack if they think it should ever be on the employee. There is never, ever, ever a situation where an employee paying an employer is a good thing.
Yes, it makes sense. I just wonder if there’s any laws that would prevent employers from doing this.
Why should there be? If someone wants more expensive software then they should pay for it.
I could seeseome countries passing laws to prevent people like graphic artists from being “discriminated against” due to their software needs.
I’m not saying it makes sense, but such laws might exist. And I want to know if they do
Graphic designers makes sense, also a PNG made in a proprietary program can be viewed with any photo viewer. Documents editors are completely different.
What an awful take. “Free as in freedom” includes not being docked pay for your software choices.
Right, well, free means free. Free software users wouldn’t get docked. Non-free software users would.
I said free as in freedom, not free as in gratis.
But since you want to double down on this bad idea, let me explain why it’s shit:
If your employer expects you to use tools to do your job, they should pay for those tools if they cost something. Passing off operational expenses to the employees that use more expensive tools is hideously anti-worker, and it’s not even funny as a joke.
Employers should pay for the tools used to run their businesses, and you should learn what the “free” in “free open source software” means, because it’s not about money.
There are no tools that you need to pay for that are not free as gratis or libre.
But I would be OK with only charging for software that’s not libre. So software thats gratis but not libre doesn’t dock you, since you’re contributing to something good that helps the world
You have never had a job before, huh?
Lol I’m in my 30s and hold a senior position. I’ve had a lot of jobs…
Oh, you failed up. Checks out.
Yes, the word free in English both means free as in gratis, without cost, as well as free as in freedom.
Every company I’ve ever worked for
I wish my employer (state government) would use Linux. But unfortunately, they are all in with Microsoft. Everything has gone that way. SharePoint, Microsoft hosted Exchange, OneDrive, etc… And it’s as horrible as you can imagine. It’s awesome when I can’t access my personal files because Microsoft servers are down. And don’t get me started on the CrowdStrike fiasco!
That sucks :( I’m pretty much in the same boat. I get to use a Linux desktop at work on the proviso that I don’t raise support requests. We use Microsoft for nearly everything so naturally it’s an uphill battle. The web UI is quite buggy and “not recommended” by my org. Teams doesn’t support Firefox so I have to run a separate browser especially for it.
But aside from interfacing with Microsoft everything just works, and really nicely.
Teams as a PWA installed via edge seems to be the best way to make management happy enough and works better than the windows client sometimes
