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597 points doener | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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mapontosevenths ◴[] No.46181864[source]
Its been a very long time since I was a Sysadmin, but I'm curious what managing a fleet of Linux desktops is like today? Has it vastly improved?

When I last tried in a small pilot program, it was incredibly primitive. Linux desktops were janky and manual compared to Active Directory and group policy, and an alternative to Intune/AAD didn't even seem to exist. Heck, even things like WSUS and WDS didnt seem to have an open version or only had versions that required expensive expert level SME'S to perform constant fiddling. Meanwhile the Windows tools could be managed by 20 year old admins with basic certitifcations.

Also, GRC and security seemed to be impossible back then. There was an utter lack of decent DLP tools, proper legal hold was difficult, EDR/AV solutions were primitive and the options were limited, etc.

Back then it was like nobody who had ever actually been a sysadmin had ever taken an honest crack at Linux and all the hype was coming from home users who had no idea what herding boxen was actually like.

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Nextgrid ◴[] No.46182272[source]
This is my concern with all those "success" stories about Linux as an enterprise desktop OS. Run it for 10 years and show me the actual cost savings/improved productivity.

Microsoft is trash and is getting worse day by day, but at the very least it's the same trash everyone has to deal with, so people mostly got used to the smell, and you can get economies of scale in tools used to deal with said smell. MS is trash because of incompetence.

Linux is dozens of different flavors of trash, so you don't even get economies of scale dealing with it. It's trash because of ideology - the people involved would often reject the functionality you mentioned for ideological reasons, and even for those who do accept them, won't agree on the implementation meaning you now have a dozen of different flavors, and will take up arms if someone tries to unify things (just look at the reaction to systemd).

Linux works well for careers where shoveling trash is already part of your work, in which case all the effort doubles as training for the job and experience makes this a non-issue. But for non-IT careers where the computer is just a tool that is expected to work properly, it's nowhere near there, and will never get there because everyone's instead arguing on the definition of "there" and which mode of transportation to use getting there.

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morshu9001 ◴[] No.46182767[source]
Google gave its employees a Linux laptop option for well more than 10 years, but in the past few years they started steering everyone away from it, before formally announcing they want to scale it back.

This is despite them being a tech company, and despite them having already invested in their single Linux flavor (gLinux). Wayland migration was also a pain.

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1. pjmlp ◴[] No.46184347[source]
Most companies that I know that allow employees to use Linux laptops, IT washes their hands of any kind of support.

While anyone with macOS or Windows laptops can open support tickets, the hardcore Linux users get invited to join internal forums to help themselves.

Thus naturally one needs to be really into it, especially when dealing with software that doesn't even exist.

So we get our IT supported systems and run GNU/Linux either on servers or VMs.

I sense only if there are changes imposed at governments level, would companies change their stance on this.

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2. morshu9001 ◴[] No.46197573[source]
That can work, but it creates other kinds of problems in some companies. The point of the IT dept is to avoid spending engineer time on fixing random laptop issues, and also to deal with the monitoring software that has to support every OS the employees use.