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?
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.
Yes, and I’m forced to bring Win11 home if I need to work remotely because they allegedly would need to install drivers (?) on and reconfigure their firewall for me to use the Linux Cisco VPN client? So it’s too much work.
I have a small homelab and I’ve never had to install drivers to support another operating system connecting. I also don’t have to pay a subscription for access points and can reconfigure them myself so maybe it’s a Cisco thing.
Was macos at work, now Linux dev machine. Its a big up.
To be honest, all those are web apps now shrug. Zoom, slack, teams, docs, sheets, <insert word named app here>, all open in the browser. So IDC what the OS is for them. Linux Zero-Touch deployments are still in progress IMHO so I get why they arent here yet for a lot offices, but we are closer now than ever (thanks atomic OSs!).
Yes, unfortunately
We’re a Linux shop at my work. We do have a windows PC due to corporate policies…but everything we do on our windows PCs we could do from Linux.
Outlook? Website. Excel? Website. Jira? Website. Teams? Website. Nearly everything we do front end wise is all web based. Which, I know electron sucks, but from a “Linux as a main desktop environment”…I’m pretty damn happy with everything being web based nowadays. It’s all OS agnostic.
I’ve been lucky, at two of my previous jobs, I was permitted to use a Linux laptop instead of the default Windows ones, it was wonderful.
Sadly you’re right though, at least in the US, even in the IT world, unless you’re working specifically at a Linux company, you’re almost certainly using Windows.
My current job is all Windows, even though my team spends a significant amount of time maintaining Linux systems. I just open up WSL and try to pretend It’s running on bare metal. 😞
My main computer at work is Linux, I do have a Windows build box where I compile code for Windows, and to make my life easier I usually develop it there as well. But outside of platform specific code, or code related to a product that’s Windows only, I don’t have any issues.
As for other software Teams, slack, zoom, Google meeting and docs work well enough that I can use them daily without issues.
At a previous job for some reason they wanted me to use Windows, which was absurd since I worked on the backend of a site which would only be deployed to Linux, didn’t last long in that job after that was made official.
In short, as long as my main machine is Linux, I don’t mind having to have a Windows machine to do Windows stuff. But I get annoyed out of my mind if I’m either forced to use Windows as my main OS (it’s just not ergonomic for me), especially if there’s no reason for it.
Yes you are right, usually linux users that are not in IT have no choice but using bad microsoft computers (or Apple for designers/upper upper management) when they are employees.
But if you are general manager, or an independant contractor, you do whatever you want, and I have been on Debian, Void since 3 years now and it is just great.
People complain that “your files are not compatible” (i.e.: their excel version can not open a moderately complex xlsx file), and you use stupidly dumb webapp for Outlook and Teams, but otherwise if you don’t need to commit for a specific software (built for windows or mac, like Adobe suite, 2D or 3D CAD softwares, some kind of old school ERP or CRM), you are all good. Basically everything done by management staff can be done using LibreOffice.
The “cloud revolution” at least has given us this good result : you can have basic business utilities solved through a webclient, hence GNU/Linux OS is ok to work with.
It depends on your work. I’m a web designer and I can use anything I want. I also work from home.
I am working in company where about 35% of users are on Windows, 40% on Linux and 25% on Mac. In Linux, official way to use MS Office is web apps, but Libreoffice is quite heavily used too.
I’m constantly looking for a way to convert the entire office. At the moment, it’s ‘how to replace Revit’ and I found Bonsai but the 2d drawing elements are still being developed. If anyone has any suggestions on BIM software that can use IFC files, I would be most thankful.
Other than that, I’ll bet our IT company will advise against using Linux because they won’t know how to use it.
All my jobs back to 2002 until now I have had full authority to run any OS I like on my work computer. I’ve run nothing but Linux on all my work machines and I have convinced many coworkers to do the same.
I use Windows at work and it reminds me of how much I love Linux.
I think it’s certainly possible for us to move away from Windows and Mac, but convincing people isn’t easy. The end users would be easiest to convince because most of them are just using the limited array of applications required for the business and don’t much care what’s under the hood. The people who really need convincing are the reat of local IT support and maybe vendors.
I think the path to broader business adoption of Linux runs through IT support.
I have been on macOS at work since December of 2019. Before that it was Windows since 2014. If I had the choice for Linux I might take it over macOS, but I’d happily take either over Windows.
No. We are a proper engineering company.
So not an industrial automation engineer. Nothing but windows software.
Ignition for scada works on Linux, but nothing else does.
Lol what kind of engineering? Because it probably isn’t mechanical, electronics, or civil because most of those programs don’t work in Linux 😂
I have dreams of KiCAD and FreeCAD becoming good enough to be used a lot in industry and kiCAD is nearly there, but missing tons of productivity and collaboration features, but altium is still pretty ubiquitous, spaghetti code garbage that it can be.
As an engineer, piss off with this pretentious crap.
LOL, spotted the “windows engineer”.
Thinkpads running Linux for the staff.
We use open-source. Our own on-prem servers running Linux. A lot of our software is also open source. Our git, our office suite, our video and chat… All open source.
We just got rid of our Google Cloud connections a few months ago, but we’re still reliant on aws, cloudflare, etc.
Yeah, have fun making stuff when the device you’re using to do so is actively fighting you
