The smb server is Linux, my desktop is Linux.

The office workers use a debloated Windows 11.

I installed pihole at the same time as the server swapped from Windows to Linux, so now they believe the Linux server magically sped up the Internet.

At my current job they asked what OS I wanted for my laptop and Linux was an option. I do have a Windows desktop at the office that I remote to that needs to be Windows for technical reasons, but my main device is Linux.

At my job before this I worked for one year on my own Linux laptop, until one day I asked for a laptop lent temporarily because I was going to travel and my wife and it had to be Windows. I never minded much because it was temporary, but when I came back I was told that I was supposed to always have been using a Windows machine and that I shouldn’t use a Linux machine anymore (even though our product was a website deployed to Linux servers). That was one of the reasons I eventually took another job, not the main one, but an important one nevertheless.

Before that the company also offered Linux.

And before that it was a very small company when all of the owners were software engineer guys using Linux themselves. I remember one day we were discussing OS and someone said “can we take a moment to recognize we’ve been talking about this for 15 minutes and no one even considered Windows as an option”.

I didn’t need to.

Once I had to write a utility and made sure it works on other OSes except GNU/Linux. The CTO asked in review why doing so? I explained, he said no, make it Linux only, if somebody needs to use it, they will have to install Linux then use it.

Something I appreciate about that place till this day.

I can’t even install Rust…

Fun story, started at a new company as a software engineer. Default device is windows, with maybe a mac if you specifically ask for it/have a need for it.

However, turns out the person in charge of IT is super chill and lets you install what you want on your on risk. Fair deal as I am not developing super critical infrastructure.

I don’t work at an office, but at a bicycle workshop. We just have the one computer at the frontdesk to register sales and new memberships (we’re a non-profit association). So the PC doesn’t have TPM 2.0 so I convinced the board to install linux on it, since it’s a security risk to keep using Windows after it’s going to be discontinued. But that wasn’t easy ! Especially because one of the board member is an Apple fanboy and keep saying things like: “If it’s free, it’s probably not very good”. :[

I used to work at a place where it was just a small operation of us three in the IT dept. helpdesk goon me, network engineer, and IT boss. I wanted more experience on Linux in a corporate environment. IT boss saw this as a learning opportunity and gave the green light so I switch my machine over.

Then network guy switched. IT boss thought this was fine too. “We learn some lessons the hard way” he mused.

This lasted several weeks and we had basically no issues. We were actually more productive than he was. He eventually was getting frustrated this little experiment of his wasn’t going the way he wanted and mandated we “had to use windows because our customers were using windows.”

We switched back. Everything went back to shit but it was familiar shit so he was fine with it.

I brought in an old surface pro X and used it. Technically still complying and it did help us figure out some issues some of our other ARM based customers had. Any it worked better than the shitty dells we were given.

working at a research institute, nobody set any restrictions for what os i install. there are guidelines, but only to make sure that people keep their os secure. i’m using fedora, my boss uses mint, a colleague uses macos. everyone is free (as long as it’s within a somewhat tight budget)

Used Ubuntu LTS in a VM at a bank, a tech company and now using it as an officially sanctioned OS at my workplace.

i consider myself lucky in that i’ve only been forced to use windows twice and both times they were okay with wsl; so i used that instead.

i’m guessing it depends on what your work is and since i’ve primarily worked on linux & solaris; there was no reason why i couldn’t use it as my primary means for getting work done.

both times, they used the microsoft office suite (primarily outlook, word and excel) which was always problematic; but i suspec that’s a permanent thing since that’s still not even seemless when you have to go back an forth on those apps on a mac and windows.

In a large organization, IT team/Organization policy will never allow to let you use Linux as your OS unless it is required for project or mandated by client.

With ransomware attacks on ever rise, IT will always try to control all aspects of your office laptop/desktop. As they think they got it sorted for Windows, they will fight tooth and nail if you ever submit it ticket to get your OS replaced with Linux without project requirements.

In my view, as long as I’m allowed to install whatever on my personal devices even while working from home, I’m fine.

Office devices aren’t really my property. For me, Windows during office hours, and Linux thereafter.

Didn’t need to, our developers work on Linux because that’s what their tooling uses.

Granted it’s either Ubuntu LTS or RHEL because of compliance, but they make it work. Unfortunately Linux is a second-class citizen to central IT, so when they make changes, they don’t really consider Linux users, they’re on their own.

At my workplace all the devs are on either Mac OS or Linux, with Mac OS being more common among Web/PHP guys and Linux among the backend devs (like me). As it turns out, given the choice, nobody actually prefers Windows. I’m still baffled by Mac OS being so common, though, at least among devs.

This works because our whole IT infrastructure is designed to be accessible via the web-browser, most of it even without VPN, via two-factor authenticated single-sign-on, most of it self-hosted (all except Teams, which obviously also needs its own authentication). This gives people the freedom to run whatever OS they like on their computers and set it up themselves, with the only requirement being to use FDE with a strong password and regularly do backups to the remote storage. We’re also allowed (if not encouraged) to use the laptops for private stuff and get to keep them when they’re replaced.

And as far as I can tell IT problems because of this diverse environment are surprisingly minimal and mostly with those aforementioned web services.

Not currently… 😢 Our final product only runs on Linux, yet we develop on macOS. Even that is super annoying because we basically have 2 different buildchains we have to maintain. I was told “the tooling works” to develop on Linux… except the tooling is slow as hell and doesn’t work all the time because we have bugs (I end up debugging the tooling). If we were on Linux, we could delete all this unnecessary tooling.