I’m getting sick every day at this Microsoft Windows slowness and bloat. 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 is your experience?
My current company is being absorbed into a much larger company right now, got bought out earlier this year.
I was the only IT for the smaller company, and I was using 100% Linux (Debian with KDE Plasma) on my laptop to administrate everything in our environment, which is mostly Windows.
- Our DC with AD on it, I used Remmina to RDP into it for admin tasks.
- O365 and Azure/Entra stuff was all in the browser.
- Our ERP system is cloud-based, so browser was fine for that too.
- Our access control system was cloud-based and the RFID card reader/writer was plug-n-play on Linux.
- Our company SMB share worked fine with Linux in Plasma using my AD credentials.
- I set up my company OneDrive sync using rclone, it also worked flawlessly.
- Our Fortigate firewall VPN has a native Linux app which, although ugly as sin, works without issue.
- I used OnlyOffice for a while, then switched back to LibreOffice. Both worked basically perfect, a few very minor font bugs, (bullet lists having a slightly different style for the bullets, etc.)
- Teams, I used a wrapper flatpak for a while, which worked fine, then switched to the browser version of Teams. No major issues, I had a bunch of meetings, screen shares, webcam, presentations all on Teams in Linux, pretty seamless.
- Email, Outlook in the browser is fine. I also used Thunderbird for a bit, but didn’t like how buggy it was in the Flatpak version, and the Debian package was way too out of date for my taste.
Now that we got bought out, I am being forced off my Linux laptop and onto the new company’s Windows laptop, which really sucks. I am planning on quitting soon, as I hate using Windows and I am very underpaid at my current job as it is. Only real perk was not having to report to any IT manager/CTO, and being able to use Linux.
MacOS, nearly everyone who does anything with development or ops is using a MacBook. Though lately more “normal” employees have been getting MacBooks too.
If this what works for work stuff, then more power to ya. I just hope you don’t do any personal stuff on there…
At least they have some kind of choice…
We have some client’s engineers who use MacBooks. I’ll just say that I’m wary of anyone technical using MacOS at this point.
Though some of our devs use them too, but from what I’ve seen, they could just as well use Linux.
Wary why? I work remotely in IT and manage a ton of Linux systems with it. Because my company has a large number of remote employees they limit us to Windows or Macs only, and have pretty robust MDM, security, etc. installed on them. Since MacOS is built on top of a unix kernel it’s much more intuitive to manage other unix & linux systems with it.
Personally I haven’t used Windows really since before Windows 10 came out, and as the family tech support department I managed to switch my wife, parents, brother, and mother in-law all to Mac’s years ago as well.
I’ve met some folks who’d use an Apple laptop as part of their general attempt to look more competent than they actually were, for managers and such. Or maybe just for their ego.
If your choice is between Windows and MacOS - I dunno. Depends on how AuDHD-tolerant one can make MacOS. What I usually see doesn’t inspire confidence.
This is very anecdotal, but both myself and the vast majority of my peers use macOS as their base host system. I work in cybersecurity, specifically offensive penetration testing. Myself, most of my coworkers, and probably half of my peers I’m competing against at local conference CTFs or that I know at local meetups are using a MacBook host with VMs spun up to need.
Something like 75% of my job is done in a Linux VM. Doing it on a MacBook is infinitely more pleasant than any other laptop I’ve ever tried using, regardless of what OS it’s running.
Also, and again extremely anecdotal, the most technical people I’ve ever known were all using hackintoshes when I knew them, and would use MacBooks when away from the home/office.
I really don’t understand where this “Mac products are for non-technical people who want to appear technical” trope comes from. MacOS is a phenomenal product for non-technical people. My partner is the least technical person in the world, but they started using macOS in art school and found it intuitive and easy to use. As a technical person, I appreciate the polished UI built on top of the Unix kernel and that I can do everything I need to do from a terminal shell. The fact that the product is excellent for both wildly disparate types of users is testament to how great it is imo.
It’s different between countries, I suppose.
Also people want different things. For me customizable desktops (say, FVWM however I want to script it) are important, because I easily get distracted and overloaded. I also can’t ignore aesthetics, and in my subjective taste Apple style is concentrated bad taste combined with arrogance. Also there’s something in their UI design making me feel nausea and get tired faster. I don’t know what it is.
Other people want something else.
It comes from subjective experience in a country where Apple is traditionally not very popular.
I also can’t separate their disgusting advertising from their products, subjective again.
Most places seem to issue Mac’s now for the role. I just create a 90% cpu & memory Linux VM on them and work from within that, with the exception of teams or zoom meetings being native on the Mac (no echo cancellation on linux VM’s, it seems). Works mostly well, but it is arm64 based linux, as the Mac’s currently are M series.
Ended up going with Arch for arm64, as it had the simplest way to add widevine support to my browsers.
Much better than being native on the Mac… Mac doesn’t give me the two select&paste linux 2nd copy buffer, doesn’t provide focus follows mouse, no auto-raise, and type in partially covered windows without raise. Essential for my workflow.
When I could get away with it at work, I did.
In the last… I want to say six or seven years, issuing Macbooks to sysadmins has been a common thing in the sectors I work in. Rather than put up with us going rogue and messing up license tracking by rebuilding our stuff with a distro of choice, management just throws OSX at the problem (us, we’re the problem) because operationally it’s close enough for our purposes.
It’s not my choice or preference, but the money’s green.
I’m in the lucky position that I always could work with Linux. I was working with people that couldn’t be bothered to run Windows on their Desktops (administering mostly Linux Servers anyway). In my first job we had a “Standardized” Fedora desktop that was actually attached to our AD so you could log in at any desktop with your domain user. However we did have internal tools and some software requirement that only were available on Linux meaning everyone in our department had a Windows VM for using those tools (kinda overkill but ok). My last job we didn’t have any standard other than the system had to be encrypted and had Eset installed other than that we could set it up he was we liked.
Could I work with a Windows desktop? Sure I’m on the Terminal sshing into systems 98% of the time anyway but at the end of the day I love to simply be on Linux having a workflow I’m used to.
Regarding Office I was just using Office online for anything that needed it.
Getting Linux Systems into AD is possible (but of course requires cooperation on the side of the IT department)
Proxy and VPN should mostly be doable (but of course might not be able to be deployed via Group policies)
Well… i am feeling somewhat heretical writing this… but i am a happy ChromeOS user for years now. In my opinion its a very good middle ground between a super stable platform that JUST WORKS and with the integrated Linux VM i have the opportunity to Install the necessary tools for my work.
Interesting… But you use it at work and it is allowed?
Yup, i use it for work and its not only allowed, but the company is at the moment evaluating if it would be feasible to move all our clients to ChromeOS(-Flex).
I understand the general sentiment regarding Google, and it is somewhat earned, but if you compare Windows and ChromeOS (or the whole Google ecosystem) then its interesting to note that Google is (at least in my opinion) much, much more user friendly than Microsoft. No dark patterns, hassle free updates… it surely has its upsides.
I got my IT department to allow me to use WSL2, because I have to clone and patch the Linux kernel for our embedded linux device.
😁now I can install stuff, for which I otherwise would have need windows admin privileges, into WSL2, like steam (just for the fun of playing a windows game over proton on a ubuntu install on WSL2 which is just linux hyper-v emulation on windows -> games run very bad and seem do not use the nvidia card in the laptop 🤭)
So my setup is for work windows running WSL if needed, at home, I have a macbookpro11,3 dual boot BigSur and up to date endeavourOS(Arch+KDE) as allrounder devices, a game PC running endeavourOS(Arch+KDE) (NVIDIA 970), a raspberry Pi W2 running my homebridge, an iPad pro for easy webapps (configure *arr services) and streaming. Other not so much PC coputing devices available are PostmarkedOS pine phone, TvOS running Atv, various game consoles with most CFW installed, and many iPhones (collected over time, self bought is only iPhone 4s, 5, 6, X and 12mini)
So, I use them all big OSs 🤔 well, not really android anywhere… 😁 I just recognised that my router is BSD based (OpnSense)
all big OSs*
👌🏻fixed
🫸🫷
I am a Windows admin but two of my colleagues who are Linux admins use Linux machines that are running Ubuntu+a few internal tweaks to make it better fit us. The Linux platform is developed primarily by one of the developers at the company and some others (primarily developers) also use Linux. The vast majority of the company uses Windows.
There are also a few hundred Macs.
I have been considering getting our flavour of Linux installed on a VM or maybe even dual booting for testing.
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 nearly threw up reading first paragraph 😂
I have a fairly new, expensive (not $5000 expensive though) laptop from work. It’s quite a high powered laptop. It’s full of administration crap that constantly runs in the background using 8 GB of RAM and at least 20% of the CPU, nonstop. Daily I run out of RAM and it freezes. I have a 15 year old laptop that, without exaggeration, is faster to use and can run more programs without running out of RAM.
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?
LOL
They are trying to bore only your customers, attackers have direct access (=
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.
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…
In my previous job I was doing Java development on e-commerce (Hybris, then renamed to SAP Commerce) and the laptop (a beefy thinkpad) took ages from powering on to being able to work, also Java compilation could take 30 min and just starting up the project on local another 5.
Had the opportunity to install Linux (the policy was that dual boot was required and don’t disturb IT with Linux issues) and oh boy, from turning on to being able to work was incredible fast. Compiling went from 30 to 5 min (with same Java official version from oracle in order to avoid any implementation discrepancies between openjdk and the oracle JDK in prod), and starting tje local server went from have enough time for preparing a coffee to seconds.
Unfortunately my current job only allows Windows and the policies are too strict.
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.
This mind set has it’s limit when you need to get something done, see your family after 8h of work and don’t log overtime for some stupid windows s****.
But, yes, in most cases I just log additional unproductive time in my timesheet. It would suck, if I couldn’t compansate the overtime and leave work earlier on Fridays or so. Management has to live with the fact that working with Windows is not as efficient.
Right. But what can you do if your job has absolutely no interest in Linux? Force them? I’ve talked to some leads and managers and they laughed at the idea of using Linux. They just don’t need it for whatever they do. And 100% of our backend is SQL and C#. And you know how much they drool over visual studio and all those MS products.
C# on Visual Studio is a fucking nightmare. Switched to Rider on WSL the first chance I had, not looking back.
Then again, if this is running on .NET Framework, there is no choice, afaik. You get a buttplug made of barbed wire in Windows + VS, and you’ll like it
I couldn’t agree more, bud your last statement seals it. You WILL like it. Lol
Our dev stack could totally run on Linux, but management wants standardization for security reasons. We have a mixed environment of Win10 and Win11 and our scripts to setup and update the dev environment produce sometimes unpredictable results even on the same version of Windows. <_<
We’re not even using WSL2 to speed things up because we don’t get enough time to adapt our scripts to configure docker to use WSL2.
My next move will be asking to get Fridays off, because they denied my whish to use Linux. If they deny my part-time request, I will look elsewhere in 2025.
Good luck. Hope they don’t deny this one, too.
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.
What about the experience is miserable? I’m just curious as I really like it.
Yeah, I do all my development in WSL2 (Ubuntu) at work every day. I use VSCode on the Windows 11 host. It’s great!
Would I prefer to use Linux natively? Sure, but I also have to support some Windows-only legacy code and a D365 environment or two, so Windows makes sense.
I am happy with WSL as well. I don’t try to get Linux GUI running.
I use vscode remote ssh session. I run docker natively on Linux, not on windows.
The trick is to get DBUS services running in whatever flavor of Linux you install. Don’t try running a full UI session.
The biggest problem I have on Linux is time drift after laptop goes to sleep. it is easy to deal with manually.
Do you have a guide that makes this possible?
And what do you mean by using vscode remote ssh session? Does this vscode instance is started from the WSL via some kind of
ssh- Y?Vscode is installed on windows. Then you install vscode ssh plugin from Microsoft and open ssh connection from vscode to any Linux including WSL hosted Linux.
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?
I actually run away from Mac. Mac OS X is long time as not Linux.
WSL is a way better option than whatever VM option is on Mac.
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
I think I’m also in this group right now. Just not Windows…
I don’t use Windows anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those “Linux purists”, if other people wanna use Windows, go ahead. But I’m not using it. I swear to god, if it becomes mandatory to use Windows at my company, I’m leaving the next day.
Hah I don’t have that privilege but same mindset. It is weird to me that in many companies you were deprived of choice at least. Linux can be worse too but let me just try it and see.
The reason that most companies don’t want you to do that is because they don’t want people running around installing their own OS and doing whatever they feel like on company devices.
Letting people do that would be an IT and information security nightmare.
It’s the same reason that no (sane) company would give local admin privileges to everyone.
The reason why companies generally don’t have an official way to use Linux is because it’s hard to support two platforms simultaneously. Especially when you have, certificate and/or AD network authentication for wireless and wired like we do. You also need to consider how the two platforms should interact with each other. For example Linux devices should be able to connect to the AD domain with Kerberos and need to be able to access SMB shares and probably other systems.
In short it’s more complicated than “just let me try”.
I understand your point but I disagree. My senior head of security department uses Linux with Windows VM for Microsoft stuff like Office, Outlook, Teams etc. Besides that many things are handled through configured LDAP with AD and many pain points through Linux and Windows interchangeability is solved through Samba like fileservers. I also hear more and more about FreeIPA thing. I only heard and read of Kerberos that is hard to do.
For everything else like
- proxies
- certificates
- VPNs
Everything is the same or even better and more secure on Linux. SSL stuff just comes from it… Even from BSD systems I think that is known for simplicity and security. With so many bloat on Windows there is so much vulnerabilities and things to manage while you can KISS. (Keep It Simple Stupid)
I don’t need 80% things on Windows but I do have them as I’m forced to and they also are like some ticking security bomb.
I don’t ask for a perfect Linux support, but at least an ability to do so. I tried it and in the end it came out that Microsoft likes Windows more than Linux (I know surprising). Intune crashed, certificates were weirdly Windows specific and after that I gave up.
Isn’t freedom about doing whatever you want especially when you want to get as much of your system, hardware so they just can squeeze as much productivity as possible from an employee?
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.
My wife complained that Mac got worse at searching samba shares.
How?
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.
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
I moved to macOS full time now. Things work much better now.
Less bloaty? How much?
Corporate support for Macs is usually worth than on Windows.
It is a very risky move.
Nice, why risky?
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.
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.
Yet Wayland is still working on proper color management… which doesn’t make it fit for professional work
I moved to macOS full time now.
How do you like it?
I like it a lot. The initial move was predicated by working in the entertainment industry and all the shows coming through our theater needed qlab.
But after that I started using it for personal use. I was unable to move my photoshop cs6 license over because I have been unable to get a copy of it in 64bit. But I have since switched to affinity. It has a steep learning curve, but I mostly use it for graphics for my shop so it does what I need it to do.
I have been using libre office since forever, that moved over with me.
Before getting my MacBook Pro I was doing most of my gaming on my ps5, so I am not missing a lot there. But most of the games I do play are available on the Mac (No Man’s Sky, FF14, Palia, mudlet, Apico, Mudborne).
When I connect a monitor it works, when I connect a TV through my 4x4 matrix it works.
Fedora atomic or not is nice.
I got tired of manually installing Arch and was pleased with Fedora the most.
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.
With an atomic system it’s less likely to brick your system. You can stay in the debian world with vanillaos (I’ve never used it) but fedora atomic is very good. On a day to day basis you shouldn’t have/use admin rights to break your system
Mixed environment, bunch of windows servers and a bunch of Linux servers. I currently run NixOS on my company owned Framework laptop, with the caveat that I have to deal with or work around any weirdness that comes up.
I’ve been wanting for a while now to fix up my config (weird sleep waking issues, broken hibernate, implement full disk encryption) or maybe switch to Fedora. Just haven’t had the time.
Remmina is great for RDP, OnlyOffice preserves Microsoft office formatting well, KDE’s network manager has working VPN connections for Cisco and Palo Alto, and I do a lot from the browser (email, O365 admin,etc).
There is friction, though. As mentioned the sleep issues. Never fun getting to a site and finding a hot, dead laptop in my bag because it decided to wake up and not go back to sleep.
For things that HAVE to be done in Windows I have a VM I haven’t powered on in a months or two, and a “tech” server to rdp to with more network access.
I’d also like to get more familiar with Nix. I can handle system settings and packages from the Nix repositories, but packaging my own software is something I’d like to learn (software and printer drivers for Ubuntu/fedora, etc).
the sleep issues.
Ah, the life of a sysadmin
