I’m getting sick everyday at this Microsoft Windows slowness and bloatness. 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 are your experiences?
Right now I’m stuck on a Mac laptop. I hate it, but after our Network team could not manage to get Global Protect working on Linux, and my boss decided keeping them happy was easier than keeping me productive, I didn’t have much choice (Mac or Windows). I’ve worked in environments before where I was able to run Linux on my laptop/workstation, so long as I was able to support myself and do the required work. I used remote desktop (Or a Windows VM) for my Windows work; my browser and Java for most everything else. Now even Office is a shitty webapp for the most part, and Teams “works” on Linux (As much as Teams works at all).
Even here, I have to wait until Helpdesk manages to build out support for new Mac OS releases, so I’m still on 14.6.
I told them prior that I would be leaving the company if they forced me to migrate to Mac. I’m currently looking for a better position elsewhere and will tell them exactly why when I turn in my notice. Not that it will change anything, it’ll help me feel better.
Not a sysadmin, but a programmer. My work machines have been:
- 2003-2008 Windows 7
- 2008-2011 Ubuntu
- 2011-2019 Arch
- 2019-2024 NixOS
Probably going to keep using NixOS. This is a very cool OS.
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 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?
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.
I manage the few linux servers at my company. I use a windows laptop to ssh to my servers. Windows for me is fine, but I do very little on it outside of ssh or emails. However, I would never use windows outside of this.
Simple so you probably fine with that. I do a lot of automation so besides using Microsoft Office I feel like I’m being heavy with everything.
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.
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 constant struggle. On Linux I can say it’s good enough.
Understandable. Make do with what’s available, friend.
Yeah also I’ve seen some guys trying to have Windows OS with Linux VM. Or the opposite Linux OS with Windows VM for Office stuff. Sounds like a good agreement but with my barely working office laptop I don’t think so. It would be nice to have out of the box image support of office Windows though.
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.
Yes, I use Fedora and love to break the permissions of shared Office-Documents. /s
The only thing I have learned is not to go too deep into customisation. Because people watching me using hyprland are some kind of disgusted.
I just use KDE with dark breeze theme. That’s enough and nobody gets hurt.
Trueee Just get the job done and that’s all.
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?
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.)
Shame but understandable.
i use a linux laptop; but then they got bought out and our new overlords won’t let me get another one.
i’ve had it for 5 years now since i didn’t want switch to mac during the last 2 refresh periods; but it’s only a matter of time before it dies.
i think i’ll just switch jobs when it does. lol
Mac is still better evil than Windows but same thinking.
I have tried using my pc as a hackintosh for the heck of it (it was surprisingly easy) it feels bad like everytime you have a untrusted app you need to allow it in settings and even windows 11 feels better. But this is just my opinion maybe mac os has changed and is better now.
i’ve had macbooks for work before and they work okay like windows does; but i think i’ll end up with windows since i do 99% of my work in a terminal emulator with keyboard mapping customizations and re-mapping the keyboard in mac takes weeks/months of trial and error to get it right since it requires me to shift all of the other keys & their shortcuts around to get it work like it does in linux.
i’ve also used wsl in windows for work before too and that worked better for me since i didn’t do anything extra besides copy/paste of my keyboard map. also: since i only use the laptop for work, i don’t care about microsoft being evil; i’ll let the infosec guys handle that.
MacOS. Systems doesn’t want to support Linux, and the only other option is windows 11. A few of my coworkers have Win11 with WSL and fight it every single day. They’re diehard windows people who have been seriously considering moving to MacOS for their next round of upgrades.
Same here. I really really tried with WSL but the experience is miserable.
Swapped to MacOS and like night and day. I’d be perfectly happy with a £300 linux laptop though.
Yeah, it is slow in the end, not native, many things to configure (like proxies) and so on…
Great! Was it hard also to switch to MacOS as a Linux user for work?
What about the experience is miserable? I’m just curious as I really like it.
I think I’m also in this group right now. Just not Windows…
Also Mac here. I started with a linux laptop but still have to do some desktop support work for the company and since they all use Mac it’s just easier to dogfood it. At least I have a decent terminal emulator.
Try this terminal emulator then https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2
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.
Wdym with linux can be broken?
Don’t mess woth the system and go atomic. Fedora atomic kde or gnome or wm
Wdym with linux can be broken?
Linux mint kept harassing me to install the official drivers for my wireless card, so I did. It broke my ability to use WiFi.
I told Linux while in presentation mode I did not want the screen to sleep, it took that as sleep after 5 minutes.
Every time the laptop sleeps/restarts my screen resolution is borked, half the time the correct resolutions are not available and I have to disconnect all my monitors, restart, then connect the monitors.
Most solutions I hear are use a different distro, learn command line, you should not be using Linux if you cannot fix this stuff.
That is what i mean when I say Linux can be broken.
Those things happen on windows as well
Yep, many people complain about Wayland and just graphic things in general. On Windows on the other hand sometimes I cannot click buttons. Example: unmute myself in Teams. Why? Because the docking station after some time cannot figure out where is the focus and also Electron sucks. And many other thing like weird behaviour with moving apps’ windows from one screen to another.
I would argue that they happen way more on Windows. I’ve never had any of that happen to me on Linux (mostly a Fedora user) but plenty of times on Windows from 7 to 11.
The worst part is it is not Windows fault. The pure kernel and the system without any bloat works great. I tried AtlasOS once and I felt bad for Microsoft engineers that their work is being spoiled with greed, bloat, enshititifaction. Everything was going smoothly and flawlessly.
But so many components are just… Hacky… Unnecessary… Just weird that it barely works especially so many companies don’t know what they are doing. Then the dependency hell happens of this software.
Linux on the other hand is so much transparent.
I moved to macOS full time now. Things work much better now.
Less bloaty? How much?
Lol i think most of us Linux people just forget how basic most peoples computer usage is. An example, i wanted a program yesterday. Im on Manjaro and it was a .deb so i had to look it up in the AUR, clone it, compile and install it. All in command line. To someone who is used to that its not a big deal just some copy and paste and searching. To someone who is used to windows where you download .exe, and click install thats a herculean task.
I disagree that people shouldnt use linux if they cant fix stuff on their own etc. I fully support making some distros entirely GUI and really easy to use because some people just need that and theres nothing wrong with not wanting to get all into the weeds setting up a computer. Thats the whole point of distros is to have various options for different use cases. I hope youll be able to find a linux setup that works for what you need. As of now a little bit of terminal may be needed even in the easier to use distros depending on what your doing tho.
If you’re on Mint still, that’s X11 fucking you over. AFAIK, Mint hasn’t moved to Wayland, though you might be able to install an experimental session, but I wouldn’t trust it like a distro that’s all-in on Wayland.
I used to contend with monitors jumping around like a jack russell terrier with X11, never keeping settings, dropping out due to ACPI. Wayland has fixed pretty much everything I had going wrong with that stuff.
Boot a live USB of some distros that default to Wayland like Fedora, and see how it reacts to screensaving, then make some choices from there.
I moved to macOS full time now.
How do you like it?
Changes from the upstream can make your system nonfunctional. For example VPN for remote connection. They change something, push to Windows but on Linux you need to figure it out by yourself.
On linux you just put the ovpn into the settings. VPN connections are built into the system
Yes, I have used systems that broke. Yes I followed bad advice and broke my system. Ever since not touching my system, that didn’t happen again. If I would touch windows, I would brik windows as well.
Yeah that’s another thing that Windows can break in the same way as Linux.
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.
I use office 360 in the browser.
I’m not a typical sysadmin but I use linux anyway. Somehow I always found some workarounds, but I am also not the only one using Linux in our company so the IT needs to work with us to some degree.Haha nice. I heard that office 365 is okay but for let’s say 10000 rows Excel it lacks performance.
