I’m liking the recent posts about switching to Linux. Some of my home machines run Linux, and I ran it on my main laptop for years (currently on Win10, preparing to return to Linux again).
That’s all fine and dandy but at work I am forced to use Windows, Office, Teams, and all that. Not just because of corpo policies but also because of the apps we need to use.
Even if it weren’t for those applications, or those policies, or if Wine was a serious option, I would still need to work with hundreds of other people in a Windows world, live-sharing Excel and so on.
I’m guessing that most people here just accept it. We use what we want at home, and use what the bossman wants at work. Or we’re lucky to work in a shop that allows Linux. Right?
Full Linux shop here. Love it…
Desktops, laptops, servers.
For those rare customer teams meets, we just do it in the browser.
</saltRub>
How big is your install base at work? Still wondering how to replace something like Active Directory, Group Policies and the like for centralized management akin to Windows based networks.
FreeIPA does a passable job at replacing AD for the absolute most basic functions. I used to use it for sudo rules and user management at one of my previous jobs, even though it wasn’t a Linux shop.
FreeIPA covers most scenarios. Kerberos, Dynamic DNS/DNS, LDAP.
GPO equivalency would need some config management tool. Ansible is what RH would suggest, but something with an agent would probably be better.
I use an unofficial teams appimage all day every day.
I think its probably an electron thing.
I hate having to use it but it works fine.
my employer using windows on their machine is their problem. i could be faster via bash in several instances, wouldn’t have to wait ours for updates to be done … but i get to drink tea and listen to complaints about outlook from my co-workers.
it’s okay. i get paid.
Yeah getting paid to sit there while windows wastes 20+ minutes of company time updating is always a treat
“Do the least amount of work for the most amount of pay you can”
Windows is a win for the proletariat at work. Linux was made for the proletariat for the revolution.
I believe to be the only one running linux on the work laptop at the company. I told them I’d like to use linux when I applied and they told me “fine, but you will have to install and maintain it on your own, we have no support personal for this”.
I installed arch linux and have been happy for years. MS Teams runs in my browser.
I had that a couple of jobs ago, but since then I’ve been stuck with Mac or Windows depending on the employer. I understand their reasoning, but it’s annoying. At my current organisation, I use WSL2 (which I was allowed to install for Docker support), and I do everything except the corporate stuff in that. So Edge, Teams, Outlook, whatever proprietary VPN we use at the time on the host, all my actual development work on WSL. It’s mostly fine.
Same here :)
No. We are a proper engineering company.
Lol what kind of engineering? Because it probably isn’t mechanical, electronics, or civil because most of those programs don’t work in Linux 😂
I have dreams of KiCAD and FreeCAD becoming good enough to be used a lot in industry and kiCAD is nearly there, but missing tons of productivity and collaboration features, but altium is still pretty ubiquitous, spaghetti code garbage that it can be.
So not an industrial automation engineer. Nothing but windows software.
Ignition for scada works on Linux, but nothing else does.
As an engineer, piss off with this pretentious crap.
Thinkpads running Linux for the staff.
We use open-source. Our own on-prem servers running Linux. A lot of our software is also open source. Our git, our office suite, our video and chat… All open source.
We just got rid of our Google Cloud connections a few months ago, but we’re still reliant on aws, cloudflare, etc.
LOL, spotted the “windows engineer”.
Yeah, have fun making stuff when the device you’re using to do so is actively fighting you
Office 365 and teams work fine on Linux in Chrome or Firefox, including voice calls, video calls and screen sharing, and notifications with pop-ups and sounds.
Excel, in particular, is 100% inside Office365 in the browser when I have to interact with it. In the past, I have created Excel files in LibreOfffice and uploaded them to Office365 to convert. Though I haven’t been tempted to do so in a few years.
Most of my coworkers are not aware that I run Linux at work. My boss knows and doesn’t care. My peers are just surprised when I mention it, because I use the same tools without issue.
Zoom works great on Linux, as well, both in bowers and as the native app. Many corporate VPNs are compiant with open standards, and so don’t even require any additional install. Cisco’s isn’t made right, but they provide a Linux client that works fine.
Slack works fine in browser, including full first class notifications. I haven’t sought out a dedicated client app, but I recall having some options.
DropBox and Google have particularly decent Linux client applications, and of course, fully functional web tools.
There’s also some excellent ways to run Android apps nearly seemlessly inside an Android emulator of Linux. In theory, I could resort to those, but I haven’t because everything I need works in a web browser now.
I’ve heard that the two glaring exceptions are AutoCad and Adobe Creative Suite. I understand that neither works on Linux or in a browser (per other threads on Lemmy).
Oh yeah, and Linux has more and better ways to produce nice PDFs than Windows does, and of course reads them without issue
Oh, and yes, mandatory compliance stuff like antivirus tools and CrowdStrike also have compliant options for Linux. Some of the really shitty spyware level invasive stuff probably hasn’t been ported to Linux, but the “keep me virus free” stuff seems pretty available - because they want to sell copies for Linux servers.
Edit: If this seems needlessly thorough, it is because I worked to independently verify all of these details before my upgrade. I figure my notes might help someone making the case to switch, or just researching whether they need to not switch.
Linux has more and better ways to produce nice PDFs than Windows does
Go on…
Fair enough!
Conversion
First, I haven’t yet encountered a pre-existing document on Linux that didn’t turn into a nice PDF when fed into “Print - Save as PDF”, which I have found to be present by default on Gnome and KDE (the two most popular desktop environments). So for the majority of distros, Print to PDF is pre-installed and available.
For advanced use cases, there’s Pandoc. Pandoc can convert most document formats to many other formats, and gives fine grained control over every step.
Authoring PDFs
For authoring a quick PDF, there’s LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
And of course there’s GnuImp, Krita, and so many more options for editing some images to add in.
Most distros ship with LibreOfffice or OpenOffice, and at least one image editor.
But I do recommend investigating some free and open image editors. There’s many use cases and twice as many options. If the default isn’t for you, what you need may be one (free) Software search away.
But can I just use plain text? (Yes)
For control freaks like me, there’s also a whole ecosystem of tools that work well with Markdown, ASCIIDoc, LaTex, and ReStructuredText.
For the curious, start by trying VSCodium with a Markdown extension.
You can tune your extensions here, but I think I recall “Markdown All-In-One” getting me all the way from raw text to nice enough looking PDFs in one command. Maybe it was two, using the built in “Print to PDF” dialog.
Once again, PanDoc is the powerhouse of this use case, and many excellent tools are available.
I’m a teacher and I make Linux work for me. Open doc formats get converted to pdf for the shitty windows 7 running the printer in the printing room, and the Android/Windows only app for communications I just run on my phone. PPTs run fine. When there was a problem with the projector, ‘IT guy’ went to my laptop, got confused (it’s Gnome), I told him not to interfere with it because it’s Linux. He proceeded to say ‘Ah, not working because it’s not windows.’ Later that day he actually came to fix the cable to the projector.
There’s few things more satisfying than having the “IT guy” say “oh it must be a Linux problem” only for them to have to eat crow within 24 hours.
Company went “here’s your budget for ordering a laptop. Put on it whatever you want”, and so there’s NixOS running on it :)
(To be fair though: small-ish, tech focused company)
Debian at home. Red Hat at work. I have tried to talk them into better OS choices, but really I’m just glad to not be on Windows.
Why not the same at both?
Yes, I’m forced to use Windows at work and that’s part of why I only use Linux in my personal life.
Window is so stupid and annoying. It needs to reboot like twice a day for updates. Not to mention individual apps that need to update in the middle of usage. Also the news/spam and stuff. It’s garbage. I’m the guy who’s constantly telling everybody that we should switch to Linux.
(Also, even though my work laptop is Windows, I do most of my real work connected to a Linux server/IDE.)
Professor here facing the same problem. I am bounded by administrative procedures with grandma school administrators.
I use Linux at home, of course. Debloated my Win11 machine at work but hope to use Linux instead everyday.
Would requesting a mac with the argument of having access to a Unix shell potentially work? In college my IT instructor used a Mac with a windows VM via VMware Workstation and it pretty seemless. He’d use the Mac for most stuff then jump over to the Windows VM for windows specific stuff, and then diving into the native Bash shell for anything else. Honestly it was a pretty sweet setup
I am an electrical engineer, so even beyond Teams and MS Office, several of the engineering and CAD programs we use are not supported or only partially supported on Linux (i.e. hardcoded to only work on a specific version of Ubuntu, lol).
I have spoken to our IT guy, and he would be completely on board with using Linux, but even he acknowledges that there is no reasonable path to us doing so, so I just sort of accept it.
several of the engineering and CAD programs we use are not supported or only partially supported on Linux
Gotta change software if y’all want to be more than hostages.
That doesn’t really work there’s nothing to change to… at least in civil engineering. It also isn’t possible when the client specifies the software a product has to be delivered in
I’m allowed my own laptop cuz most of my work is ssh to a server and fix shit. You have to register your laptop on the network first though.
Office, Team: these can work via the browser if your company/organizations pay for the subscription. In fact, the web versions run much better than the standalone desktop ones for me.
Code editor, terminal, programing in general: These work much much better in linux. You open a terminal and you write commands to install stuff. Editors are even easier, i.e. nano, vim, vscode, emacs… etc. just pick your poisons…
Email: now I login to my exchange email using the browser. That works for 100% of the stuff I need to do: basic emails stuff, accept/decline meetings…etc. Unless you absolutely need to use Outlook, there should be no problems.
Now… the real problem lies in specialized software like CAD, CAE tools. I like Linux but there isnt a free CAD / CAE tool that is comparable to what the industries are using. In academic? absolutely you can use for research.
The last several places I worked gave me a choice between Windows and Mac OS, so I picked Mac OS.
I recently got my Linux-laptop in a heavy MS-based company. It is enrolled via Intune and I can access all company resourcws an MS365 apps through Edge.
Apart from having to use Edge for all of that, it is a great experience compared to what I am used to.
But it took a while and a lot of complaining about being allowed to use more appropriate tools for our job. But the bottom line is: ask for it. Tell them why you need it. When they say no, try again later, document why your current setup fails and why getting a Linux-machinee would work. Maybe you will succeed. IT here has gone from “we don’t use open source” (actual quote) to giving us Linux-laptops and setting up Linux-servers on OT. They grow from this also.
Some companies will also supply Macs - several of my colleagues got MacBookPros just by asking for them. I, unfortunately, missed the “open funds” window and must wait until the current “all POs over X$ must be signed by GOD” phase passes.
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