Companies that use desktop Linux
Basically title. Do you know of any companies that use desktop Linux?
I can think of two in my area in Brisbane - Adfinis and Red Hat. Both have a pretty small presence here from what I last heard (several employees each).
My employer allows the Linux team to use Linux but it's discouraged and our lives are made somewhat difficult.
Local here. We all use Linux desktop. Libre office. Gimp. Krita. Inkscape. Vscodium. Thunderbird. Sublime. Etc etc. We have a programmer who favoured Windows. We finally converted him. Now we only have the mac laptop to deal with having to do osx builds.
When I was at Driver's Village, a fairly large dealership in central New York, I noticed the salesman was using a computer with wallpaper that said Windows 11. This was before Windows 11 was even released. It was very obviously a Gnome desktop. I'm guessing IT just put the windows 11 background on it so the people using it wouldn't complain that they didn't know how to use Linux.
This is hilarious.
How well did it work?
The salesman I was dealing with seemed to have no trouble using it, but all he was doing was using a web browser and some database access.
What do you use for database access?
I didn't work there. I was a customer. I didn't know what they were using. I didn't recognize the interface, I just barely know enough about databases to recognize that's what he was doing.
We have both Linux and Windows machines in my team. We do all the work in Linux, and register hours in Windows. We also all have iPhones that we only use for 2FA.
That's some expenses right there.
Without background information that sounds kind of insane. Switching to alternative time tracking software and getting YubiKeys or alternatives instead for 2FA would've saved so much money as well as time every day.
I'm assuming they meant that they were company phones, and that additionally they were required for any work related MFA requirements.
If that's the case, it would be YubiKey in addition to, not instead of.
As for the time tracking software, those are often part of a much larger accounting, payroll, and/or HR software suite. Having his team spin up Windows vms, or even have separate older windows boxes somewhere, probably makes more financial sense than not. At least, until they can switch to a more modern suite that has a web portal.
I opened up the floodgates at my office dedicating support for anyone wanting to. All our servers and production are Linux so probably 1/4 of the staff is cli literate.
So far it's me with NixOS and one other guy running Debian.
Half the remaining use WSL.
This is why Microsoft made WSL, they knew they were losing ground big time amongst devs.
I've loved WSL. I've been able to throw an Ubuntu CLI in front of 30 devs that had almost no Linux experience. I've got them scripting and doing service control. The ssh terminal is reasonable, they can use standard openssh pems. The only real problem is the VM doesn't play with cisco well so they can't easily VPN and use the VPN sesh in WSL. I have workarounds, but they're kinda crappy.
I work for a company in Texas, USA. We actively discourage Windows being used in our organization and push people to use macOS or Linux.
I'm kinda of the opinion windows is just the pointless middle ground between Mac and Linux, to my knowledge the only advantage it has left nowadays is active directory
That said it prevents apple from getting a monopoly on the pc market I guess
Wow. I don't think I've seen a dumber take than "Windows good because it prevents an Apple monopoly" in a long while.
Where I work,~2,000 employees and contractors, I'm almost certain I'm the one person using Linux (Fedora) and refusing to use Windows (so they deployed a cloud Windows 365 instance for me to have access to the in-house platform).
I'm blessed to hold a position for which the company would have a really hard time replacing me, I think that's why they haven't booted me (chances are they will at some point, but I don't care anymore).
It still blows my mind how the IT team tries to justify being locked into Microsoft, and then telling me I could potentially become a point of vulnerability, when my system is easily the most secure in the whole company and my habits make for little to no possibility of ever exposing anything outside of the company.
Because they can manage and control all the windows PCs , pushing updates automatically, restricting what users can do locally and on the network, they have monitoring tools and whatever antivirus and antimalware tools they have, and are able to easily manage and deploy/remove software and associated group licensing and so on and so forth.
Meanwhile you're a single user of unknown (to them) capabilities that they now have to trust with the rest of their system, basically.
The first rule of corporate IT is, "control what's on your network". Your PC is their concern still, but they have no effective control over it. That's why they're being a bit of a pain in the ass about it.
What's wild to me is Linux systems can offer better lockdowns than Windows.
Its just vendor lock and their CTOs are at fault to me
Yeah, I get the philosophy behind their actions and intent. They can audit that cloud PC all they want. In my computer, I'm lord, god and king, nobody gets to see what happens there but me and those I want to.
Yep, and to the person justifying the IT department's invasion of privacy: they've been lying to us for years, there are breaches ALL THE TIME. Workers will give up every right in the face of corporate excuses? 🤷♂️
So they are gaslighting to cause you to have doubts. So they are using a psyche which is a symptom of them having unrestricted access to your time and ears
They have tried everything. They do get an A for effort though.
Hostpoint, one of the largest hosting companies of Switzerland uses Linux Desktop Clients.
In 3 of my last 4 jobs as developer I could use Linux as desktop. The 1 exception did not have the admins that could think ahead of what Amazon or Microsoft has told them. They where also struggling with other 'modern' ideas.
Maybe a German thing, but Linux for a dev is quite common here.
400 staff German state institution, Windows desktops are standard, but you can get a supported and standardized Linux Mint installation provided by IT on your personal computer upon request. A few dozen people do. We also provide some 150 publicly accessible PCs for research in or brach locations, all of which are Mint as well. And IT staff is allowed to install any system on their hardware they want, no questions asked; many run Linuxes. Linuces. Linnixees.
Lineés. Linacea. Linii.
In my team we use both Linux and Mac (I don’t want to disclose my company, but it’s in Sweden). IT isn’t entirely happy about some of us using Linux because it’s more difficult for them to administer the computers (i.e. install spyware), but so far they’ve been unsuccessful in making us switch.
In my experience, the larger the company, the more likely they are to force you to use Windows. The smaller companies will be more relaxed about the whole thing.
The largest company I've worked for that allows Linux had a staff count of hundreds of engineers and hundreds more non-nerds. In their case though, the laptops were crippled with Crowdstrike and Kollide and while the tech team was working hard to support us, we were always aware that we made up around 1% of the machines they manage and represented a big chunk of their headaches.
The response to this you usually hear (from me even) is that "I don't need support, I know what I'm doing". Which is probably true, but the vast majority of problems is in dealing with access to proprietary systems, failures from Crowdstrike or complaints about kernel versions etc.
TL;DR: work at a small company (<100 staff) and they'll probably leave you alone. Go bigger and you'll be stuck fighting IT in one way or another.
I wish my employer (state government) would use Linux. But unfortunately, they are all in with Microsoft. Everything has gone that way. SharePoint, Microsoft hosted Exchange, OneDrive, etc... And it's as horrible as you can imagine. It's awesome when I can't access my personal files because Microsoft servers are down. And don't get me started on the CrowdStrike fiasco!
That sucks :( I'm pretty much in the same boat. I get to use a Linux desktop at work on the proviso that I don't raise support requests. We use Microsoft for nearly everything so naturally it's an uphill battle. The web UI is quite buggy and "not recommended" by my org. Teams doesn't support Firefox so I have to run a separate browser especially for it.
But aside from interfacing with Microsoft everything just works, and really nicely.
Teams as a PWA installed via edge seems to be the best way to make management happy enough and works better than the windows client sometimes
When I was working for Averitt Express, a trucking company out of Cookeville, Tn, our yard trucks had computers in them (for yard and dock management) that ran Ubuntu. This was 10ish years ago.
That's awesome - great to hear about Linux desktops bring used by non-techies especially in a company.
How was it received out of interest?
They didn’t care. You know non tech folk, they don’t care so long as it works. If you’re lucky, they know enough to hit the button with the power symbol to turn it on, but make sure you have step by step instructions printed out for those that can’t figure it out. I wish that was sarcasm.
In our location it was mostly used for passive tracking of equipment via a scanner on the roof of the truck and tags on the trailers and we didn’t use the software much beyond that. From what I saw of it, it was some native custom application. Used the default Gnome interface and design scheme of the time. Looked to be pretty idiot proof.
Yes. At one employer, we had an entire domain in our AD forest that was Red Hat / CentOS / Ubuntu workstations for the developers.
I work for a major network infrastructure company. We can choose from Windows, macOS, or Ubuntu for work laptops. I chose macOS, but I'm probably going to switch to Ubuntu with my next laptop refresh since a lot of our internal tooling works better on Linux.
we can decide ourselfs if we want mac, windows or ubuntu (no other distro allowed). Our code runs in docker containers and except for the IDE our tools are web-based for the most part anyway, so it doesn't really matter which OS you use. though I heard there were quite a few issues with docker and Mac when the first M-chip Macs were used. it's a software company in Germany with ~150 people.
My 4 last employers have used desktop Linux to some extent:
Sure most of it was on top of Windows, but if you fullscreen it you can barely tell the difference :)
Not Swedish?
Nope, Norwegian company until they were bought by Chinese investors a few years ago. They did have a lot of developers in Sweden and Poland though.
Failed attempt at an IKEA joke, considering the was given a stack of components and told to assemble my PC part. 😥
Ahh, now I get it :P
Retail stores, restaurants, hotels, logistics and shipping companies...tons. You may thinking Gnome or KDE, which you'll probably be more likely to see in dev teams.
I Sysadmin in education here in Brisbane. Half our server stack is Linux on a Nutanix hypervisor. I do all my work from Linux, my junior admin recently moved his workstation to Fedora KDE, I use Kinoite.
The student and staff devices are 95% Windows, manager doesn't care what we use to administer. Officially we're a "Microsoft School"
It's sad you don't teach students about Linux instead because Windows is getting worse and it's pretty bad already.
I just build what they need, networks, auth, security etc -I'll leave teaching to the teachers
google and nvidia both do.
i don't know if it's still true; but they gave their employees 2 computers where their workstations were usually linux and their laptops were either linux or mac if they were engineers. it was their choice to decide what to get; but they usually went along with whatever their peers where using; except for non-engineers who always wanted macs no matter what, even if their windows machines were newer and better by miles.
Lowe’s uses a customized Linux distro for their department terminal computers. Most of what you do is in browser or terminal applications, if genesis is still in use.
Lots of arcade games and other amusement machines made in the last twenty years run on desktop Linux.
Incredible Technologies games, Raw Thrills/Play Mechanix Big Buck Hunter Pro, Arachnid dartboards, and TouchTunes jukeboxes off the top of my head.
Oddly, most Japanese arcade games are running on Windows, for ease of portability in their market, which makes PC ports actually extremely straightforward.
Source: I got to use machines when they were doing a reboot and the whole interface loads up for the multi-game cabinets like a emulator frontend that just launches and kills the processes.
Journeys (the shoe chain) and Hollister Co. both use Linux distros on their point of sale machines. Hollister's machines are pretty locked down and can basically only run the RPoS software, but a lot of Journeys' software is browser-based, so they have to be a bit more capable.
Pretty sure they're both custom distros, though.
Most people in my company use OSX, followed by a few dozen Linux users (various distros; whatever each one prefers), followed by a few Windows users (whyever they want that). So essentially: we can choose what we want to use.
I'm a contractor and I use linux if that counts :D
My company used to allow it, but then it became clear people were doing too many dumb things with their work computers to control them normally. For example, some people would explicitly turn their PCs off without updating the OS every Friday and were nearly a year out of date.
That, plus other security concerns I don't remember surrounding the tightening of our policies for security certifications required to net a very demanding client, made it so that we needed to institute mobile device management (MDM) for everything.
We went with Microsoft's version because there were some crucial things I forgot that only it could do. But it didn't support Linux.
So our few people using Linux had to choose between Windows and Mac OS.
My work use it in a limited capacity.
We primarily use Windows but some also use MacOS and some use our internal Linux spin off Ubuntu. With some internal tools and all that.
The Linux users are primarily developers and a few Linux admins and I'm pretty sure the Linux platform is maintained by a developer.
Can't say what company, but a large company that provides education tools has been looking into ways to be less dependent on Microsoft. They have some of their employees currently using Linux computers right now. Some employees in the IT department still need a second Windows computer.
I work for a web host (UK based). We're entirely WFH so as long as you can support it yourself you can use it. They don't care what Distro we use.
The vast majority of devs at my company uses desktop Linux (Ubuntu LTS). Though admittedly our IT department would prefer if we all used Windows.
My last 3 employers have let me use Linux on my work laptop, I've gone with Ubuntu each time, it has worked really well for me. I'm lucky that I get to use Linux since I work as a web dev, it often matches production more easily that way.
I used Linux for work. It was fine until we migrated to O365 from workspace. I've found enough workarounds that no one complains.
Every company I've ever worked for
Yeah anyone with that info is not gonna actually name the companies in question lol.
But i know four in Melbourne. And i can tell you that most serious server infrastructure is nix. Especially in ISPs, RADIUS babyyyy
Opengear in Brisbane; development teams often use Linux.
Up until several years ago our proprietary CAD CAM FEA software had GUI desktop linux support on SUSE or RHEL. They recently dropped GUI desktop version and only support nonGUI use going forward (for batch work), and dropped MacOS a few uears before that. I am hoping with thr uptick in Linux numbers they would reconsider at some point
Current company's full windows, I use both as does the software I maintain. Retail/POS software.
Previous company used linux for trading. Fintech.
Previous previous used linux solely (well, my team did): Ubuntu for devs, product ran on modified Slackware. Large scale retail/POS.
I've noticed that some "mobility" startups are using Linux. E.g. companies working on electric or automated vehicles.
Some public places like libraries here in Denmark use Linux on their computers, but I don't know to what extent.
In the company I work with you can use whatever you want but I'm the only one using Linux :(
At my prior company (we got bought out) the thin clients clearly ran a Linux system that then connected into a windows VM.
Thin clients, neat!
My company uses Ubuntu on a few products they sell to customers, but it's only a relative few devs that use desktop Linux as a daily driver.
Not us. And worse the guy in charge loves edge and hates firefox.
In the US, a lot of Lowes Hardware Stores use Linux on their employee computers. Most movie theater projectors are running CentOS, and most movies that come in on hard drives are formatted to Ext2.
A Turkish tech chain uses base Ubuntu, that is all I saw
Is there a law that prevents employers from docking someone's salary by the expensive proprietary software you opt-in for, instead of using a free option?
What an awful take. "Free as in freedom" includes not being docked pay for your software choices.
Right, well, free means free. Free software users wouldn't get docked. Non-free software users would.
I said free as in freedom, not free as in gratis.
But since you want to double down on this bad idea, let me explain why it's shit:
If your employer expects you to use tools to do your job, they should pay for those tools if they cost something. Passing off operational expenses to the employees that use more expensive tools is hideously anti-worker, and it's not even funny as a joke.
Employers should pay for the tools used to run their businesses, and you should learn what the "free" in "free open source software" means, because it's not about money.
There are no tools that you need to pay for that are not free as gratis or libre.
But I would be OK with only charging for software that's not libre. So software thats gratis but not libre doesn't dock you, since you're contributing to something good that helps the world
You have never had a job before, huh?
Lol I'm in my 30s and hold a senior position. I've had a lot of jobs..
Oh, you failed up. Checks out.
Yes, the word free in English both means free as in gratis, without cost, as well as free as in freedom.
What? No genuinely which company is docking employees for using unfree software. If anything it's the opposite.
I don't know of any, but I'd like to see it.
"Want to use Windows and Office? Here's the bill."
That would genuinely make sense though, proprietary software (especially paid proprietary software) costs more money for any company then open source software. Windows needs more maintenance then an ultra stable Linux distro like Debian or even an LTS release of Ubuntu or Fedora. Meanwhile Microshaft ensures that any document made with office doesn't look the same unless it's viewed with office.
No, it doesn't, because the cost of that software is on the business because it makes them money. This person is literally smoking crack if they think it should ever be on the employee. There is never, ever, ever a situation where an employee paying an employer is a good thing.
Yes, it makes sense. I just wonder if there's any laws that would prevent employers from doing this.
Why should there be? If someone wants more expensive software then they should pay for it.
I could seeseome countries passing laws to prevent people like graphic artists from being "discriminated against" due to their software needs.
I'm not saying it makes sense, but such laws might exist. And I want to know if they do
Graphic designers makes sense, also a PNG made in a proprietary program can be viewed with any photo viewer. Documents editors are completely different.
Many such companies
I think they are a bit harder to manage
That's either BS or FUD, pick any two. Stick to a specific distro and train your staff and there's no reason for any IT personnel to find linux "harder to manage".
Users grumbling it's harder to use might be a different matter.
Linux is Linux. Train your staff to properly use one and they can use them all. "Distro" is just a fancy word for "which package manager and update cycle to we chose and what logo do we put on our pre-installed wallpaper".
The Linux desktop is harder to manage because isn't a one box solution like Windows. With Windows you control everything via GPOs. You can't do that on Linux as there is no centralization.
The best solution I've scene is Ansible and Xfce4 kiosk mode. You can set and enforce the desktop layout
Windows GPOs are a right old mess. I've been managing them for over two decades. The first fuck up is the word "Group". You cannot assign Group Policy Objects to AD groups unless you use something like ZENworks or some funky WMI filters!
Settings are applied to computers or users. Many settings are available to be set for both but only make sense or even work for one or the other. MS bought out some solution providers and that's why you get the Control Panel and other handy stuff, rather roughly bolted on.
AD with GPOs with the extension to "local machines" is a great idea but dreadful in execution. MS didn't want to nobble third party apps in the past so that's why we have this nonsense. Now its all about Azure/whatevs ie MS's cloud and subscriptions.
Now you belong us!
Linux being a Unix has NIS(+) for a directory or LDAP or AD or anything else you fancy. Ansible works for all mainstream OSs, including Windows.
So often I see people confusing and conflating authentication and authorisation, machine and session state configuration databases.
I have to disagree. Group policy is absolutely the best thing that has hit the IT world. You absolutely can assign it to groups and it is pretty straight forward to make. It also has the benefit of being very wildly used and documented. Assuming Microsoft doesn't keep screwing with it I think it is solid.
Also Active Directory is just LDAP, DNS and fileshares with configurations. You can though Kerberos (technically part of LDAP) and printers in there to. It is actually a pretty good system and I like playing with it via Samba AD.
I don't want to be rude but if you hate Windows you probably need a new career. I don't mind managing Windows systems the problem is Microsoft ruining the OS. It also happens to be totally proprietary and spyware which isn't great.
I will say Windows is decent for the niche its in. Larger scales, severs, mutlitenet, high security, kiosk, etc its not good.
I'm so glad its not my job. Running 1000s of nodes and an exponential amount more of services on those in hardened configs, across clouds, dcs, and availability zones are all easier than most ad forests I've seen.
Any windows work I do is just an exercise of how fast can I get to Linux again 😆😅, but I knew Windows admins that had it figured out.
I can't say I've managed Linux desktops at scale (so technically I should leave it there) but I do manage several hundred Linux VMs with Ansible, and I manage all of my PCs with Ansible. Desktops are a different ballgame to servers, dealing with end users and all, but I still don't think it would be that hard once it's been set up.
It is just less established which means it would be hard to get the ball rolling. It is doable but would take more time than just using a basic Windows environment with AD. You also have the issue with vendor support and end user knowledge but that's a problem for another day.
That's probably a fair point. I can't say too much as I haven't touched Windows desktop or server too much.
Could be apples vs oranges here though as we're talking about getting started versus well established setup, but my current employer is looking at adopting Ansible + Packer for imaging and partially Ansible-managing Windows servers where it makes sense because of limitations in SCCM and GPO. As far as I can see across the divide Windows Server isn't all smooth sailing.
You don't want to use Ansible for Windows management. It is a pain to setup and doesn't work well.
You need an actual management tool