Linux in the corporate space
Linux in the corporate space
I made this post because I am really curious if Linux is used in offices and educational centres like schools.
While we all know Windows is the mac-daddy in the business space, are there any businesses you know or workplaces that actually Linux as a business replacement for Windows?
I.e. Mint or Ubuntu, I am not strictly talking about the server side of things.
In two of my previous jobs (I'm a software engineer) I could officially install any Linux distro to the company laptop (which I did of course) fully replacing the wintoys. Could use the machine as I liked, no corporate mandated BS spyware or anything. On of the provides a SaaS product and used Linux server/virtual machines. Otherwise it was mostly MS bits + sprinkle a little Atlanssian horrors to it.
Unfortunately in my current job I'm limited a VirtualBox Linux running a corporate restricted wintoys machine in a MS environment. A long for the days when I was more productive with my Linux installation.
It's just sad and funny how corporate world is that MS products it has to be (because reasons).
In Europe, there are companies that allow devs to use whatever they like (worked for some of those). Linux is more popular among devs than mac, but less popular than windows. I even have a friend working at a company that's 100% opensource, much to their chagrin as GIMP and Inkscape are no Photoshop.
Linux at school might become more of a thing in Germany as Microsoft 365 office online (or whatever it's called) is in a dangerous spot where it might be banned from schools. IIRC nextcloud and owncloud are positioning themselves to replace it and with that, maybe linux on the desktop might be considered. But since they have a problem with "Apple ambassadors" (aka teachers prostituting themselves for Apple), the real danger exists that schools will be more willing to spend money on fancy mac bullshit than linux. Only time will tell.
Don't be so humble. You know, I started out exactly where you are, and to be honest, you know, my heart is still there. So I see you're running Gnome. You know, I'm actually on KDE myself. I know this desktop environment is supposed to be better but you know what they say. Old habits they die hard. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. I'm an executive. I mean why am I even running Linux? Again old habits. It's gonna be fun working with you. I should join the rest of the group. Bonsoir, Elliot.
I have attended or been involved with five different state universities and a few different community colleges. For computer science, aside from one glaring exception, the default has been some flavor of Linux. The earliest for me at a school was Fedora 7. I think they had been running Solaris in the late 90s; not sure what was before that.
The only glaring exception is Georgia Tech. Because of the spyware you have to install for tests, you have to use Windows. Windows in a VM can be flagged as cheating. I’m naming and shaming Georgia Tech because they push their online courses hard and then require an operating system that isn’t standard for all the other places I’ve been or audited courses.
When I worked in VFX it was mostly Scientific Linux. A few macs were around for concept artists using Photoshop, and editorial using a proprietary video codec with Final Cut. Most business folks (in vfx called "coordinators" and "producers") used tools that were web-based and cross platform (for example, Autodesk Shotgrid, Confluence, and Jira). A lot of internal development is done in Python so no worries there, either.
In game dev unfortunately it's exclusively Windows. If you bring up even using
os.path.join, instead of hardcoding \\ into paths, devs who have never worked in another OS look at you like some sort of paranoid maniac.While I'm told such places exist, I have yet to knowingly interact with a business officially doing this for employee computers.
There was an interview with Dreamworks ( i think that was the Animation house) they use linux for everything.
In engineering CAD and large manufacturing corporations RHEL and SUSE are the two certified distros for running Teamcenter Product Lifecycle Management softare and Siemens NX CAD/CAM/FEA software (up to version 12) it is a smaller market than Windows versions, but probably took the place of the original unix versions prior to 2000
Any web hosting company will use Linux for all servers, and many developers will use it as their workstation as they tire of kludging together dev environments in windows. The devops engineers will most certainly be on Linux as that is where their tool chains live.
There are government agencies that use Linux exclusively. The DoD used to have a mandate to use oss. I'm not sure if it is still the case.
Scientists, HPC.
At my current job, our department (DevOps), uses Linux (arch). A couple of devs too (Ubuntu), the rest use a mix of Macs and Windows. The Online versions of Office work just fine, there is Teams, Azure login and even Intune for Linux now.
At my previous job, most of the company used Windows, but the devs were using 90% Linux (Ubuntu), some of them with 2 machines (laptop and workstation with GPU, point cloud stuff). Ah, the good ole days of Ubuntu 16 and Nvidia drivers 🥲
The job before that, a very small company, mostly devs, we were using half Windows, half Linux (mint).
This is Germany btw.
My past 2 jobs have been Linux Desktop. The one before that was WSL (ew)
From what I've heard, it's more common in Europe and parts of Asia. I've personally never seen significant Linux use of any kind in the IT environments I work in, sadly.
It's all Microsoft product stacks, the servers, the endpoints, the cloud environment, all MS. Sometimes their Hypervisor would be VMWare, and their NAS was a Synology. But other than that, basically all Microsoft garbage.
I did work at one place that had a fair bit of Linux infrastructure. The lead network architect was a hardcore Linux/FOSS grognard. Really smart guy and was fantastic at his job, I learned a lot from him. But the only reason that company had Linux servers and a few FOSS implementations was because that guy insisted on it and managed all of it himself.
I also worked at another place where one of the older IT guys had installed a handful of SUSE thin clients at various locations for employees to clock in with. But right after I started there, management wanted me to switch them out for Windows thin clients. I pushed back but they insisted, so there went the tiny bit of Linux at that company.
Well plenty of VMS in enterprise or corporate environments use Linux. Tenant appliances, User access gateways, DNS forwarders, web app servers in docker containers, maybe even some load balancers and siem appliances. For corporate Desktops however I've only really seen thin clients running Linux before sign in to windows VDI, and that gets phased out with Windows for IoT
Several years back, I was 100% Windows based, and only knew Linux from the web hosting scene and running VPS Systems. I landed my current job which uses 100% Linux based OS's on their customer's equipment and software, Since then, I've gained a mountain of knowledge in the Linux admin and user space to feel comfortable enough to use it full time 100% in my household and administer it.
I think you would be surprised to see Linux more widespread out there, for example, a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian out in the wild mid reboot on signage or other displays, or being part of the brain boxes in industrial machinery. Then of course, - if you have an Android phone - well...that's a form of Linux as well. :)
I'm lucky enough to be in a company where Windows is banned by the CEO. Granted, there are 4 (I believe) exceptions, but the vast majority of employees have an Ubuntu workstation and everyone has a macbook. A bit of a shame this macbook thing, really. A 2 grand thin client to ssh into my desktop when working remotely :D
The exceptions being client testing envs.
It depends. I'm working in the quant department of a bank and we work on pricing libraries that the traders then use. Since traders often use Excel and expect add-ins, we have a mostly Windows environment. Our head of CI, a huge Windows and Powershell fan, once then decided to add a few servers with Linux (RHEL) on them to have automated Valgrind checks and gcc/clang builds there to continuously test our builds for warnings, undefined behavior (gcc with O3 does catch a few of them) and stuff.
I thought cool, at least Linux is making it into this department. Then I logged into one of those servers.
The fucker didn't like the default file system hierarchy and did stuff like
/Applicationsand `/Temp' and is installing programs by manually downloading binaries and extracting them there.The company I work at uses Kubuntu. At least the devs.
It was amazing finding this out as a Linux user.
I know some schools in my country use their own linux distribution on pair with windows. And my organization has also their own linux distribution but it is barely used really. I dont know anyone who uses it, but I do know it exists.
At my company, we use ubuntu for the simple reason that our servers are running it.
This might be cheating a bit since I am a computer science student, but we have Linux servers we can access for classes, and our university library has a maker space that has some computers running Ubuntu in it.
I work in cyber security. Loads of businesses will do all the cybersecurity stuff using a combination of tools on Azure and security OS's like Kali and Parrot.
Generally I'll see it used for POS type machines, or relegated to a backend database that gets logged into for parts lookup or something. Have I seen Jimbo in accounting rocking Gentoo on the company PC. Never.
I've ran across a few professors at nearby colleges using it. Last I remember was a nuclear physicists prof using opensuse.
We run thousands of Red Hat VMs at my company (and probably as many Windows), and several of my colleagues run various distros on their laptops with all our required desktop tools/security agents.
Anecdotally and perhaps of interest, my current workplace uses a regular Dell PC running lightly customised 10-year-old OpenSUSE. It's a UI control interface for a large machine
Because the machine's expensive and production-critical, the PC isn't allowed to be connected to any networks (security airgap). It's sort of the antithesis of most corporate Linux usage: constantly online servers that do very little direct user interface
Munich's city government switched to Linux for a few years as part of a push towards open source software.
There's some programs like One Laptop per Child that donate laptops running Linux to education programs. I think Pine64 ended up donating a chunk of their base-level Pinebooks to some schools but I can't find a blog post that states where they donated them to.
Not sure if this is what you were looking for.
It's staggeringly uncommon for the desktop side of things outside of machines running a specialty app or a particularly tech-savvy IT guy.
The issue is that Windows is just really good at centralized user management and policy control. You can do all those things in Linux too but it's significantly more complicated and harder to manage.
I use Linux at the office. I'm the only employee at my company who does.
I haven't had many issues collaborating with others using libreoffice while they use MS office. I do keep a Windows VM running for those somewhat rare instances where I need Windows for something though. I also needed to invest quite some time to figure out Linux alternatives for everything (how to use company VPN, how to get MS Teams working, how to connect to network drives, etc).
But so far so good. Been 100% Linux at work for maybe ~1.5 years?
I think there are a few small companies that use it. Additionally it is used by some developers.
At our office (and probably in many) the developers mostly use Linux and the other people often use windows for Microsoft stuff like Word, Excel, and other windows specific software. We can't really choose, everyone is forced to use Linux for development so we all have a more or less the same environment
We have primarily used windows servers, but our datalake, data warehouse and internal apps are on Linux servers.
Before Chromebooks, my towns school system had netbooks which were pitifully slow on Windows. They installed Ubuntu instead. The netbooks still sucked, but probably sucked a lot less.
Well, I wouldn't really say that it's used as a Windows replacement at the company I'm working at, because all the business stuff is still being done using Windows, but almost all developers are using Linux. I was even allowed to replace Ubuntu with Arch, because I was annoyed by outdated packages. Because of the higher freedom, I can even tolerate the slightly smaller pay rate and benefits that I could earn elsewhere.
We are mostly working on EDA tooling.
We use windows at my work (I've been using Linux for 2 decades on home computer). I'm trying to migrate our work CPUs to Linux but the biggest road block is my unfamiliarity with librecad, I'm used to autocad. I use cad command line a lot and it's hard to live without auto suggest commands. Libre has the capability but it's very rough and not mature.
Linux the past 15 years across 4 different companies. CentOS, Ubuntu, then Arch. Now I'm stuck with MacOS, and it's worse in every single way except laptop battery life of the M2. Which, is nice when moving around. I'd still prefer a more powerful desktop computer since I'm 99% of time time in one of two places.
Plenty of software developers use Linux for their work.
I've set up Linux machines for a school that had ancient computers and $0 computer lab budget. Within 2 years, they purchased new Apple computers.
Depends. Lots of universities have Linux and Windows computers.
Most companies use Windows, some also Mac and Linux.
I'm alwasys fascinated by IT people who manage a fleet of Linux servers and containers, but sit in front of a Windows PC. 😃
We use Ubuntu at my work. Custom built image PXE booted so every restart is fresh. Has its pros and cons. Libre office does a decent job at replacing Office but we use Google workspace so most users are moving off local files. 90% of our users work could be done entirely through a Web browser so OS doesn't really matter as much any more.
companies that do IC design, do it under linux. traditionally they were using proprietary unixes, but today it is mostly linux and redhat or compatible systems.
engineers are using rhel workstations from dell and hp that are supported by vendors to work under linux: let's say bios updates are possible to run from within linux.
their whole workflow depends on unix with many custom scripts (shell, perl, tcl) and simulations, usage of shared filesystems, and even x forwarding.
afaik IT departments in such companies aren't happy to support linux workstations and the trend is to move the workflew to linux servers and let the engineers to connect to those via ssh, vnc or x or commercial solutions like 'citrix'.
my understanding is also that companies design some requirrments, though maybe based on what is available on the market, and love to have support and solutions that are integrated with each other. microsoft still has everybody hooked up, their 'active directory' feels to IT people necessary, they also use microsoft's disk encryption, and/or third party windows software which encrypts everything written to usb flash drives to prevent leakage of what they call 'intellectual property'.
it is of course possible to do luks encryption of linux disk drives, but afaik rhel doesn't support it, or rhel versions these companies tend to use, since they tend to use very outdated systems, even eol unsupported systems, because 'customers still use those'.
i am also not aware of linux versions of those draconian services that encrypt everything that gets written to the flash drives, or that monitor/control computer usage, web requests, etc, so companies are interested to concentrate unix systems in data centers and get rid of linux end user workstations because these require custom approaches or draconian control software is not available, while windows users can be controlled better, with available corporate solutions.
25 years ago I worked at a university computer lab that was Windows-heavy because Dell wouldn't stop donating PCs. However we didn't have enough UNIX workstations as we had to pay for Sun / HP / IBM out of pocket. Converting them to Linux workstations would be nice because the Dells had more grunt than the aging RISC workstations.
I proposed to switch a few desks worth to Debian and was given the go-ahead. After a few days learning how to preseed an installation image and getting a PXE server going I had 8 machines running CDE just like the AIX and HP/UX boxes. Users that didn't need one of the commercial engineering applications tied to one OS or another didn't notice any difference between the free (now as in both speech and beer) Dells and the proprietary workstations.
A couple of months after we got the pilot rolling, the university's IT director came to check it out and told me we're on the "lunatic fringe" for deploying an OS developed by volunteers, but otherwise offered approval as long as we could maintain security and availability.
Now every student in our local school district gets issued a Chromebook running Linux under the hood. Who's the lunatic now?
The next job offer I will accept needs to have free choice of OS. I work with Linux systems and Kubernetes only, no Winshit but I am forced to use this shitty piece of crap of software. It is slow,buggy and clumsy as hell - maybe because of all the corporate software stuff and GPOs, the only office tools I need are outlook and teams, no word or excel but you cannot remove all the other stuff afaik. Updating is hell because it is controlled by our IT department, sometimes my laptop needs 3 restarts or is stuck in a boot loop. Just let me support myself and let me install some Linux flavor. Don’t need any support from corporate it besides vpn connection. Really fuck companies forcing *nix guys using windows. I know that for sure now. Never again.
