I was thinking about this the other day. Windows 11 is starting to roll out on company laptops and I would love it if we had the choice to install Linux. But I think there are some challenges to that.
Most large companies control what employees are allowed to install on their machines for security reasons. We wouldn’t want any spyware or ransomware or any kind of malware getting installed inadvertently. Most places will use software allow lists through applications like the Software Center and use software detection programs to monitor if any non compliant software is installed.
There’s also permission management through group policies on Windows to manage which kind of user can do what on their system.
Finally, I hate to say it, but most companies use the whole Microsoft Office 365 eco system with Microsoft One Drive and SharePoint. I know we can use the web version for some of the apps, but for practicality’s sake, it’s best to have an installed version. And the cloud sync feature of One Drive is also very important for automatically backing up important work. I doubt they would let that go.
I would love to hear if anyone can offer solutions to these problems.
KDE had a policy editor back in v2.0… honesty I never really followed whether those features stuck around. But the simple version is to lock down write access to folders in $HOME, such as .config or similar. Linux already prevents most users from installing programs over the system directories without root, but I’m not sure if you can restrict new programs with +x in $HOME unless you write-lock the whole folder… Someone with more network admin experience probably knows this :)
Outlook owa pwa is 99%
The rest of the apps sans access work 99% in wine.
Google docs works great
Run NixOS don’t give em root or nix-shell. They can’t install anything you don’t allow.
Put each users allows softlist into source control. Make the boxes cron and reconfigure on demand.
Tailscale VPN.
Office 365 […] i know we can use the web version
tbf, this isn’t the only software related problem. a lot of companies also use specially developed software that doesn’t have a linux version because everyone in the company is using windows anyways and adding a different release target would likely add costs and consume more development time for those internal tools
I should’ve mentioned I’ve been practically only in IT companies. We never really had speciality software of any kind. In fact I could’ve done all of my work in Linux except for a couple of times where I had to develop in c# and .net wasn’t ported to Linux yet.
But the things I’ve mentioned were what was holding the company back from giving me a Linux machine.
tbf i am the other extreme: i work in a material science lab so we work almost exclusively with specialized/custom software
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.
$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.
The company i work with allow any OS to be installed. With a caveat, because we are heavily invested in the Windows eco system using office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics Nav and sql server, Ms AD. With that said, if you use that software for more than 50% of your work time we recommend Windows. But otherwise it is still the employees choice and if you are completely comfortable running windows in a VM, go for it. IT won’t give you endless support if you have too many issues with your VM. If we loose to much time and you are not proficient enough in macOS or Linux then we just give you a windows machine.
My employer allows Linux - only a customized version of Fedora that’s preconfigured to handle our environment, including certificates (802.1x, browser client certs, etc) with automated renewal, endpoint management software, deployment of settings using Chef, etc.
We have a few internal apps built using React Native though, which is only available on Windows and MacOS. There’s been some Github repos trying to port React Native to Linux but nothing that’s production-quality yet.
