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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m still surprised people still use the term sysadmin.
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 🧠
we not only allow it, we enforce it. windows not allowed in my company
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.
$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.
