Linux

Yeah, I remember your previous post. They were irritated at you secretly subverting security restrictions put in place by your company to use an unapproved OS on THEIR company machine and network without their permission. Not that it's "not ready". They were also warning you that you were treading in dangerous water, legally.

Now you're manipulating us by telling us it was just all about IT admins "not being ready" for Linux, not about it being a major security breach.

You have no rights on other people's machines and networks that you do not own unless explicitly granted. Period. The same would apply if you were to bring a Windows workstation into a Linux-based organization.

Downvoting because of point #4. That’s a catastrophically naive mindset, and a sure recipe to get your shit pwned if you’re running an IT org and you think that’s an accurate statement.

I feel like OP has never worked in a corporate IT job before and has zero clue what it actually entails to manage a large fleet of desktop PCs used by the average office worker.

Linux is ready for workplaces and has been for a very very long time. That is irrelevant if workplace IT support is not ready for Linux and has no budget or time to get ready for it. All your points are meaningless and have never been the problem. The problem is with management, policies and getting in house support for things and all the work involved in that. Depending on the size of the company it can take a lot of time effort and money to retrain IT staff to support Linux. And IT staff are already overworked, under-budgeted and don't always have the time to support extra things.

Not an IT expert, not a sysadmin, not a tech guru by a long shot, but as Linux user, I call this post bullshit.

The biggest problem wouldn't be about having it manage all the machines in a network; it would be having to deal with every dick and jane complain about how they can't change their desktop background or some other trivial thing they can do on windows or how a specific program is not available or doesn't feel the same.

Transition into an all-Linux production environment would require a top-down non-negotiable decision and the willingness from top brass to provide trainning down the line and deal with a good deal of shennanigans from middle management.

And no virus on Linux? Yes, it has some built in features that make a bit more robust but there are rootkits and other malware out in the wild capable of hurting a linux system. And if popularity is to come to Linux, at some point there will be a need to harden the standard security protocols to ensure system safety, not forgetting that 90% of the time the main problem is between the chair and the keyboard.

the only thing I'll say is the piece about "no viruses" would kinda go away if desktop Linux picked up at all. the security on a default Linux system is worse than macos and windows with substantial hardening efforts needed. the only reason viruses and other malware isn't common on Linux as is is because of the tiny user base.

with all this said, if enterprise use got more common, security would quickly become an important aspect.

Point 2 is a reason it's not used or used for very specific use cases within a company. Companies don't want to make a custom distro that they have to support themselves, that costs money.

The final point you made yourself the IT guys don't have Linux knowledge but they do have Windows knowledge. Easier and safer to stick with what you know than what you don't.

I'd love to not have to deal with Linux at work, but this really reads like someone who has never actually dealt with the realities of a corporate environment.

Yes, Linux is free, but staff time isn't. Who cares if multi billion dollar companies spun up their own Ubuntu derivatives - there are maybe 100 companies in the world with the resources to make that make sense. Yes, AD and Intune suck but they are still miles faster and easier to get stood up than trying to build all the infrastructure yourself with Ansible or whatever, especially if you aren't already a tech shop.

"Oh you can compile your own kernel" how is that going to make it easier for the accounting department to get their shit done?

"You don't see viruses on Linux" is a semantic argument - Linux systems get hacked all the time.

This feels like it was written by someone who hasn't done sysadmin of a Windows network in a long time. Everything is online and is almost always one click now. Provisioning, removing permissions, updating email filters, adding users. Each item is so much easier now than it used to be. I loving running my PopOs install but let's not pretend that SysAdmin is the 90s nightmare it once was.

At best, it means sysadmin have to support both Linux and windows. You're going to double everyone's tools.

This reads like an engineer who is way too invested in using their toolset and thinks everyone else is stupid for not using the same. Like someone who has never worked in management or had to make business decisions. They are looking at it only through a tech viewpoint.

Not only would you need to have an IT team that knew how to manage and support it (which costs money and time) but you then have to train your entire work force which costs insane amounts of time. You would have to do IT training for every new hire for them to even use their computer. That sort of time and training (which takes two employees, the trainer and trainee) costs a lot of money, far more than any OS licensing or end user software costs. Plus the decreased work output while the user to get used to the toolset.

In a software development company, sure, Linux might be a valid option. But it's not ready for most companies main workforce. And it's not a technological issue. It's a human resources issue.

The only thing better than good in the world of business is standard. Windows may be bad, but it's the industry standard for a ton of commercial applications. A lot of software that companies use are designed for Windows, from antivirus software to Microsoft's office suite to audio and video editing software and more. Every copy of Windows is also a lot more standard than Linux distros; the customizability of Linux makes it a lot harder to provide support compared to every single Windows user being locked into certain things. As far as the IT team being "lazy" or having "a lack of knowledge" on supporting Linux, they're working on the company's dollar, and unless there's a strong, justifiable reason to increase their workload by supporting another operating system, it's an unnecessary expense for the company. There certainly are cases where there are strong, justifiable reasons such as with Google, who maintains two Linux based operating systems and needs their staff to know how to work with them, or in situations where Linux substantially outperforms Windows for the tasks employees are doing to the point that supporting Linux is worth it, but "it can do most of what Windows can alongside features that don't matter to the companies' operation" isn't the best selling point

I mean yeah it's possible, but the reality is that most people in the company will likely want Windows anyway, and use things like Microsoft Office and a heap of other Windows only software. Probably not the developers, but accounting, HR, and so on. There's also sales but nowadays they demand MacBooks because of status symbol and apparently it sorta matters, at least according to sales.

As an IT department, if you can get away with supporting only one platform and even one model/brand of computer, it's much easier. Maybe two so sales and devs get their MacBooks. Adding a third is asking a fair bit from the IT department, and it starts adding up to a really rare skillset. I know very few that are absolutely proficient in all three main OSes.

There's also the compliance aspect. The reason my current company can't support Linux users is InfoSec/compliance. Not because Linux is insecure, but because all the standards are written for Windows. You can argue all you want about how Linux doesn't need an antivirus, tough luck, SOC2, ISO and also insurance policies all explcitly require "controls against malware" and firewalls with every OS held to the swiss cheese security of Windows. So each OS basically requires the InfoSec and IT department to write out unnecessarily detailed procedures and policies about all the security measures, for every OS in use. What antivirus runs, is it a reputable brand, how do you validate that it runs, how do you test that it detects malware, how do you validate and ensures that the incident gets reported, what tooling does the software gives you to establish the root cause and entry point, what exact user action happened that led to the exploit chain, what was the exploit chain, how you're going to mitigate and clean up after exploitation, how do you know exactly what data was compromised, and so on and on and on.

Right now most vendors support barely support the current version of Windows and macOS (especially macOS, I swear the AV software is always holding back major updates for several months every release). Very few support Linux. So either you have an entirely separate policy and audit for Linux, or you just don't support Linux.

We'll see companies open up to Linux when all the vendors also start supporting Linux, and even then, with those that do, it's a shitshow of only supporting the last version of Ubuntu or RHEL with pinned kernel versions and blatant GPL violations and GPL condoms and binary only kernel modules with no hope of recompiling/adapting them to the current version. The ClamAV trick no longer works, auditors now want real AV software with the whole exploit chain tracking I described. Which is also why those company computers are so damn slow, much slower than you'd expect. They scanning everything and tracking everything, every process tree, what spawned it, what user action led to it. My MacBook started feeling like a Dell Latitude from 7 years ago once they loaded up all the crapware on it. We had to reserve a whole bunch of extra capacity on the Linux servers just for AV to exist and do nothing because it's all locked up in containers and SELinux policies and it takes a pretty bad 0day to pwn those.

If I was the IT guy, I would also struggle to even begin to make a case for supporting Linux and justifying the time and cost. I don't like my OS, but I do my work on it, cash my paycheck and move on to enjoy my Linux machines off work.

Why are you posting a screenshot of text instead of just linking to the source?

Downvoted. Were better than this.

The post if overall very naive and while I do agree with using Linux for IT work he doesn't give the best point either.

First of all, the customization. A lot of Linux users LOVE to point this out but 1. it isn't for everyone 2. it won't be compatible with every softwares. While modern Linux OS's tend to be well tailored for devs due to most the work being command bases and having version control, it will not work out for everyone either as for a lot people it won't be convenient. Most users just want an out of the box and ready to use OS rather than a never ending mess of fixing and customizing stuff.

Second, and the most stupid thing from this post, is that Linux will never have any malwares due to it being "well secured". The reason why linux malwares aren't viral is because about 3% of people using a computer in the world use linux, even less for work considering that a lot of these people use SteamOS for playing games. Other than that, Linux is a kernel, It runs code. So on this basis Linux is as vulnerable as windows. And considering the biggest attack vector isn't some fancy exploits but someone sitting on chair in front of his computer, you can guess that Linux isn't out of risk of any cyber attacks.

but I think they just are lazy to find out ways to provide this support

It's not that they're lazy, it's a combination of not getting paid enough, and not having a reason to care.

If you were a high-level executive, I can bet you they'd at least make an effort to deliver something. Believe it or not, most people only do what's needed of them as per their job description (and that too, the bare minimum to meet the quota/standards), unless their boss tells them otherwise, or some exec shouts at them, or that they're actually passionate about something. If no one in IT is passionate about Linux, you'll never get them to accept it, regardless of how technically superior it is on paper.

The thing is a little simplistic: Linux is perfect if your job is coding, working with enterprise web UIs, sending mail and/or using Office Suites, which to be fair is like 90% of office jobs.
For the other 10% use cases, Linux isn't just ready yet because, for example, the company that produces analytic equipment doesn't even bother to acknowledge the existence of Linux for their data log software. And then there is Adobe. Adobe are just a bunch of cunts.

Some of those points aren't great. That said, of course Linux is a valid workstation OS. I'm at a 100K+ worker corporation and Ubuntu LTS is one of the workstation choices. It's also a requirement for some projects.

One of our customers previously had an IT provider who set up an all-linux infrastructure.
He told us it almost brought his business down, since he was unable to find employees.
Every time he mentioned that they'd have to work with a Linux PC (as a secretary or bookkeeper) they backed out.

Here is the thing, it can, it has been ready for most thing but... business is bussiness.

• Companies like blame someone when things go wrong, if they chose open-source there's isn't someone to sue then;
• Buying proprietary stuff means you're outsourcing the risks of such product;
• Corruption pushes for proprietary: they might be buying software that is made by someone that is close to the CTO, CEO or other decision marker in the company, an old friend, family or straight under the table corruption;
• Most non-tech companies use services from consulting companies in order to get their software developed / running. Consulting companies often fall under the last point that besides that they have have large incentives from companies like Microsoft to push their proprietary services. For eg. Microsoft will easily provide all of a consulting companies employees with free Azure services, Office and other discounts if they enter in an exclusivity agreement to sell their tech stack. To make things worse consulting companies live of cheap developers (like interns) and Microsoft and their platform makes things easier for anyone to code and deploy;
• Microsoft provider a cohesive ecosystem of products that integrate really well with each other and usually don't require much effort to get things going - open-source however, usually requires custom development and a ton of work to work out the "sharp angles" between multiple solutions that aren't related and might not be easily compatible with each other;
• Open-source requires a level of expertise that more than half of the developers and IT professionals simply don't have. This aspect reinforces the last point even more. Senior open-source experts are more expensive than simply buying proprietary solutions;
• If we consider the price of a senior open-source expert + software costs (usually free) the cost of open-source is considerable lower than the cost of cheap developers + proprietary solutions, however consider we are talking about companies. Companies will always prefer to hire more less expensive and less proficient people because that means they're easier to replace and you'll pay less taxes;
• Companies will prefer to hire services from other companies instead of employees thus making proprietary vendors more compelling. This happens because from an accounting / investors perspective employees are bad and subscriptions are cool (less taxes, no responsibilities etc);
• The companies who build proprietary solutions work really hard to get vendors to sell their software, they provide commissions, support and the promises that if anything goes wrong they'll be there. This increases the number of proprietary-only vendors which reinforces everything above. If you're starting to sell software or networking services there's little incentive for you to go pure "open-source". With less companies, less visibility, less professionals (and more expensive), less margins and less positive market image, less customers and lesser profits.

Unfortunately things are really poised and rigged against open-source solutions and anyone who tries to push for them. The "experts" who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don't even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren't aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn't aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn't even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.

Microsoft does a good job at keeping old software working alongside new software and will take a bullet for their customers. Linux doesn’t have anyone with that rep.