I’m getting sick every day at this Microsoft Windows slowness and bloat. I am trying to use as much Linux VMs as possible. I feel so unproductive on Windows. I also tried installing Linux on the office laptop. The problem is that Windows is officialy supported and the Linux is DYI. Once the IT departament changes it will sync up with Windows but Linux can be broken and you are no longer able to work. Next job I want to have full Linux laptop or at least Mac.
Besides:
- Microsoft Office
- Active Directory
- Some proxy and VPN bullshit
Everything seems manageable and even better on Linux.
What is your experience?
Previous job: Windows, because it was a company issue laptop.
Current job: Linux, because I got to keep the perfectly decent Dell laptop when I left. I wanted to make sure I purged everything, so it’s running LMDE now. Plus, there’s not much outlook and teams stuff that I have to use.
Great! However I think you are lucky one.
I’m in the lucky position that I always could work with Linux. I was working with people that couldn’t be bothered to run Windows on their Desktops (administering mostly Linux Servers anyway). In my first job we had a “Standardized” Fedora desktop that was actually attached to our AD so you could log in at any desktop with your domain user. However we did have internal tools and some software requirement that only were available on Linux meaning everyone in our department had a Windows VM for using those tools (kinda overkill but ok). My last job we didn’t have any standard other than the system had to be encrypted and had Eset installed other than that we could set it up he was we liked.
Could I work with a Windows desktop? Sure I’m on the Terminal sshing into systems 98% of the time anyway but at the end of the day I love to simply be on Linux having a workflow I’m used to.
Regarding Office I was just using Office online for anything that needed it.
Getting Linux Systems into AD is possible (but of course requires cooperation on the side of the IT department)
Proxy and VPN should mostly be doable (but of course might not be able to be deployed via Group policies)
MacOS, nearly everyone who does anything with development or ops is using a MacBook. Though lately more “normal” employees have been getting MacBooks too.
At least they have some kind of choice…
We have some client’s engineers who use MacBooks. I’ll just say that I’m wary of anyone technical using MacOS at this point.
Though some of our devs use them too, but from what I’ve seen, they could just as well use Linux.
Wary why? I work remotely in IT and manage a ton of Linux systems with it. Because my company has a large number of remote employees they limit us to Windows or Macs only, and have pretty robust MDM, security, etc. installed on them. Since MacOS is built on top of a unix kernel it’s much more intuitive to manage other unix & linux systems with it.
Personally I haven’t used Windows really since before Windows 10 came out, and as the family tech support department I managed to switch my wife, parents, brother, and mother in-law all to Mac’s years ago as well.
I’ve met some folks who’d use an Apple laptop as part of their general attempt to look more competent than they actually were, for managers and such. Or maybe just for their ego.
If your choice is between Windows and MacOS - I dunno. Depends on how AuDHD-tolerant one can make MacOS. What I usually see doesn’t inspire confidence.
This is very anecdotal, but both myself and the vast majority of my peers use macOS as their base host system. I work in cybersecurity, specifically offensive penetration testing. Myself, most of my coworkers, and probably half of my peers I’m competing against at local conference CTFs or that I know at local meetups are using a MacBook host with VMs spun up to need.
Something like 75% of my job is done in a Linux VM. Doing it on a MacBook is infinitely more pleasant than any other laptop I’ve ever tried using, regardless of what OS it’s running.
Also, and again extremely anecdotal, the most technical people I’ve ever known were all using hackintoshes when I knew them, and would use MacBooks when away from the home/office.
I really don’t understand where this “Mac products are for non-technical people who want to appear technical” trope comes from. MacOS is a phenomenal product for non-technical people. My partner is the least technical person in the world, but they started using macOS in art school and found it intuitive and easy to use. As a technical person, I appreciate the polished UI built on top of the Unix kernel and that I can do everything I need to do from a terminal shell. The fact that the product is excellent for both wildly disparate types of users is testament to how great it is imo.
It’s different between countries, I suppose.
Also people want different things. For me customizable desktops (say, FVWM however I want to script it) are important, because I easily get distracted and overloaded. I also can’t ignore aesthetics, and in my subjective taste Apple style is concentrated bad taste combined with arrogance. Also there’s something in their UI design making me feel nausea and get tired faster. I don’t know what it is.
Other people want something else.
It comes from subjective experience in a country where Apple is traditionally not very popular.
I also can’t separate their disgusting advertising from their products, subjective again.
Mixed environment, bunch of windows servers and a bunch of Linux servers. I currently run NixOS on my company owned Framework laptop, with the caveat that I have to deal with or work around any weirdness that comes up.
I’ve been wanting for a while now to fix up my config (weird sleep waking issues, broken hibernate, implement full disk encryption) or maybe switch to Fedora. Just haven’t had the time.
Remmina is great for RDP, OnlyOffice preserves Microsoft office formatting well, KDE’s network manager has working VPN connections for Cisco and Palo Alto, and I do a lot from the browser (email, O365 admin,etc).
There is friction, though. As mentioned the sleep issues. Never fun getting to a site and finding a hot, dead laptop in my bag because it decided to wake up and not go back to sleep.
For things that HAVE to be done in Windows I have a VM I haven’t powered on in a months or two, and a “tech” server to rdp to with more network access.
I’d also like to get more familiar with Nix. I can handle system settings and packages from the Nix repositories, but packaging my own software is something I’d like to learn (software and printer drivers for Ubuntu/fedora, etc).
the sleep issues.
Ah, the life of a sysadmin
I don’t use Windows anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those “Linux purists”, if other people wanna use Windows, go ahead. But I’m not using it. I swear to god, if it becomes mandatory to use Windows at my company, I’m leaving the next day.
Hah I don’t have that privilege but same mindset. It is weird to me that in many companies you were deprived of choice at least. Linux can be worse too but let me just try it and see.
The reason that most companies don’t want you to do that is because they don’t want people running around installing their own OS and doing whatever they feel like on company devices.
Letting people do that would be an IT and information security nightmare.
It’s the same reason that no (sane) company would give local admin privileges to everyone.
The reason why companies generally don’t have an official way to use Linux is because it’s hard to support two platforms simultaneously. Especially when you have, certificate and/or AD network authentication for wireless and wired like we do. You also need to consider how the two platforms should interact with each other. For example Linux devices should be able to connect to the AD domain with Kerberos and need to be able to access SMB shares and probably other systems.
In short it’s more complicated than “just let me try”.
Windows 10 Enterprise with a ton of group polices applied, no issues ever. The Windows Terminal app is really good.
What about native Linux apps do you miss?
Like what?
For me it’s
- apt
- vim / neovim
- tmux / screen
- Ansible
- BAAAAASH
- and some other commands that I use seldom but from time to time.
What kind of work do you do?
Automation of the Cloud deployment.
- OpenStack with Kolla Ansible
- just Ansible
- sometimes Bash scripting or Python
Monitoring
- Prometheus with Grafana and AlertManager
Bare metal automation
- Some BMC stuff
- MAAS
Fileserver maintance
- MooseFS with Samba
- Ceph OSDs cluster
And any other that for now I don’t have much time like
- AWX with Kubernetes
After using WSL for 6 years to do 99% of my work, our IT finally started to support Linux, so I re-imaged my notebook immediately. It’s not perfect and we do have some mandatory security and backup solutions that slow things down a bit, but the good news is that they allow us to re-nice them, so it’s not that big of a deal. The biggest challenge is Libre Office versus MS Office, because things don’t always convert the formatting correctly, but it’s still worth the hasle to avoid Windows PITA issues.
everyday
every day
bloatness
bloat
experiences
experience
I used a linux desktop in 1995 or so. Never since. Even when I was working with the company building unix and linux - to be clear, building and selling AT&T Unix and a Linux distro - our standard kit was windows. It was less hassle as winamp, vanDyke and Mozilla ran better as-is.
I haven’t used a linux desktop in 30 years of linux. Maybe this year?
My work laptop is windows sadly. It has to run a bunch of endpoint sec stuff. I get it, but still sucks. On occasion I do dual boot (separate drive) when some update breaks something and I have to have a PC to fix something asap.
Windows 11, and the group policies doesn’t allow us to use WSL. We also can’t directly SSH into any servers so we have to go trough a Citrix session to a Windows 10 “admin server” and then SSH or RDP to a Linux server. And Windows Terminal isn’t installed on the Windows 10 server, so it’s either CMD or the Powershell terminal.
It’s absolutely fucking miserable. I’m a Linux sysadmin who do a lot of automation (ansible etc) but also Python development. Try it yourselves and see how long you last! I’m jumping the fucking ship in a month though, thank the gods.
All the result of an over confident “security organization”, with a lot of hubris.
But the best part? It’s a $5000 work laptop, and my 6 year old Thinkpad (with Linux) runs laps around the thing any day of the week. Opening the file explorer takes, most of the time, 5+ seconds…
Fuck my life, and fuck this company.
I nearly threw up reading first paragraph 😂
But the best part? It’s a $5000 work laptop, and my 6 year old Thinkpad (with Linux) runs laps around the thing any day of the week. Opening the file explorer takes, most of the time, 5+ seconds…
In my previous job I was doing Java development on e-commerce (Hybris, then renamed to SAP Commerce) and the laptop (a beefy thinkpad) took ages from powering on to being able to work, also Java compilation could take 30 min and just starting up the project on local another 5.
Had the opportunity to install Linux (the policy was that dual boot was required and don’t disturb IT with Linux issues) and oh boy, from turning on to being able to work was incredible fast. Compiling went from 30 to 5 min (with same Java official version from oracle in order to avoid any implementation discrepancies between openjdk and the oracle JDK in prod), and starting tje local server went from have enough time for preparing a coffee to seconds.
Unfortunately my current job only allows Windows and the policies are too strict.
I have a fairly new, expensive (not $5000 expensive though) laptop from work. It’s quite a high powered laptop. It’s full of administration crap that constantly runs in the background using 8 GB of RAM and at least 20% of the CPU, nonstop. Daily I run out of RAM and it freezes. I have a 15 year old laptop that, without exaggeration, is faster to use and can run more programs without running out of RAM.
I have several clients with this kind of setup. I’m always baffled at the amount of hoops I have to go through to connect to my Linux server. Sometimes I have to remote desktop to a windows virtual desktop and then use the citrix session to another windows machine VIA BROWSER so I can finally ssh to the machine. Are they trying to bore attackers to death?
LOL
They are trying to bore only your customers, attackers have direct access (=
Oh my that sounds even worse than at my company. I don’t understand also why disallow WSL. And yeah I don’t think that this is laptop’s fault anymore, just has been enshititifacted with software bloat.
Most of our sysads use macOS. A few use linux but they have limited choices with distros and can only use fedora I think.
Maybe Ubunto too. Sometimes they allow you to use Linux as sys admin.
Right, but the distros employees are allowed to use are dictated by corporate IT so they are able to control them and have the required endpoint security tools. So people who prefer linux have very limited options.
Software dev here. The only Linux I ever hear of at my job is Open shift. That’s about it. We are neck deep into windows. And honestly, I don’t care. It’s a job and my bills are paid. My house is full of Linux, and I don’t care what a big corporation wants to use for their software.
This mind set has it’s limit when you need to get something done, see your family after 8h of work and don’t log overtime for some stupid windows s****.
But, yes, in most cases I just log additional unproductive time in my timesheet. It would suck, if I couldn’t compansate the overtime and leave work earlier on Fridays or so. Management has to live with the fact that working with Windows is not as efficient.
Right. But what can you do if your job has absolutely no interest in Linux? Force them? I’ve talked to some leads and managers and they laughed at the idea of using Linux. They just don’t need it for whatever they do. And 100% of our backend is SQL and C#. And you know how much they drool over visual studio and all those MS products.
Our dev stack could totally run on Linux, but management wants standardization for security reasons. We have a mixed environment of Win10 and Win11 and our scripts to setup and update the dev environment produce sometimes unpredictable results even on the same version of Windows. <_<
We’re not even using WSL2 to speed things up because we don’t get enough time to adapt our scripts to configure docker to use WSL2.
My next move will be asking to get Fridays off, because they denied my whish to use Linux. If they deny my part-time request, I will look elsewhere in 2025.
Good luck. Hope they don’t deny this one, too.
C# on Visual Studio is a fucking nightmare. Switched to Rider on WSL the first chance I had, not looking back.
Then again, if this is running on .NET Framework, there is no choice, afaik. You get a buttplug made of barbed wire in Windows + VS, and you’ll like it
True but I miss quickness of Linux, being native with my apps and just having my environment. I don’t think I ever gotten a nice working environment as it is constans struggle. On Linux I can say it’s good enough.
Understandable. Make do with what’s available, friend.
I’m currently more of an generic sysadmin than linux admin, as I do both. But the ‘other stuff’ at work runs around teams, office, outlook and things like that, so I’m running a win11 with WSL and it’s good enough for what I need from a workstation. There’s technically a policy in place that only windows workstations are supported, but I suppose I could run linux (and I have separate laptop for linux-only stuff). At the current environment it’s just not worth the hassle, spesifically since I need to maintain windows servers too.
So, I have my terminals, firefox and whatever I need and I also have the mandated office-suite, malware protection/IDR/IDS by the book and in my mindset I’m using company tools for company jobs. If they take longer, could be more efficient or whatever, it’s not my problem. I’ll just browse my (personal) cellphone while the throbber spins on the screen and I get paid to do that.
If I switched to linux I’d need to personally take care of my system to meet specs and I wouldn’t have any kind of helpdesk available should I ever need one. So it’s just simpler to stick with what the company provides and if it’s slow then it’s not my headache and I’ve accepted that mindset.
Hmm that is also a nice a way to put it. However when you are slowed you can be demanded more productivity even though you cannot do anything about it. Maybe except unpaid overtime. Do you have anything for this?
I live in Europe. No unpaid overtime here and productivity requirements are reasonable, so no way to blame for my tools on that. And even if my laptop OS broke itself completely then I’m productive at reinstallation, as keeping my tools in a running shape is also on my job description. So, as long as I’m not just scratching my balls and scrolling instagram reels all day long that’s not a concern.
I use a Windows laptop because that’s what is supported by our infrastructure, our endpoint protection and our cybersecurity insurance.
Also, to help test changes before they are rolled out to users.Understandable.
Most tech people actually use macs, because corporations prefer them for their tech employees, while the normal employees usually use Windows. Very few corps support linux on the desktop for their admins – even if their infrastructure is all on linux.
You wish. Most tech companies will get you the cheapest laptop they can get away with.
I remember being denied a 64bit laptop when developing a 64bit only application lol.
I used to have a Linux laptop at work. I was even allowed to install my chosen distro. Then the IT department said “we don’t really know Puppet or how to manage Linux, but we know JAMF, so you’re all getting Macs now.”
My job satisfaction has gone down since then. However, in more positive news, they did end up giving away the old Linux laptops to the employees when they moved office.
It is always interesting to me that companies can afford new Macs but not use old laptops for Linux.
It’s a support question. It may cost $2k more for a Mac, but if it’s officially supported, auto patched, remote managed and they can prove it with security tools, force patching and restrict users, use standard well known tools for compliance and security monitoring/administration/etc, they will easily save thousands in corp licensing, training costs and legal costs. That $2k+ really becomes negligible.
Any source on that mac claim? I’ve not seen any proof of that at all.
(Edit: To clarify, I know people are saying they use MacOS here, but I don’t think the claim that most tech people in corporate settings use MacOS to be true. I only have my personal experience in a very large corporate environment, and am asking for information as every team I’ve worked with was using Windows.)
I am a software developer and work on Kubernetes based project.
I was given a Mac laptop when I joined. It was a few OS releases behind, because corporate IT didn’t support newer versions.
Macs have to run some sort of VM to do docker based development.
VMs are not that great.
When time came, I requested a Windows laptop. I installed Debian on WSL 2. Then got it to run systemd properly and installed Docker on WSL. Then vscode on windows host with remote ssh into WSL.
This setup beats Mac any day for me.
I wish I could run Linux on work laptop, but corporate IT doesn’t know how to deal with it.
