Any small/mid sized businesses using linux
Just wanna know if there's anyone managing and supporting a company-wide linux desktop deployment.
What are the hurdles during first adoption phase, what day to day support is like and which software are being used?
Using Linux in my company doing Software Engineering. Everything is fine, except the lack of some specialized tools like properitary compilers.
Not exactly you question, as it is a small installation there is not much support. The biggest issue by far is the acceptance from business partners, which stick to their office365 and won‘t accept anything Otter.
Yah I don't blame them for not liking Otter. I'm more of a beaver fan myself
Otter Browser?
Don't know why people are such sticklers for msoffice even when they're not power users. I'm having a hard time pushing just libreoffice, let alone Linux in my company.
BSA and Microsoft will always nag business about office.. They do threaten any uni/education uni in Asia, if we don't have any license or having MoU or buy from them, they will find even tiny small wrong doing, either if you student are using pirate windows, they will blame the uni, and bring it to the court.. We only buy the Education pack yearly because last time it doesn't end well with BSA...
Even I have office license yearly.. Family pack. I only need the one drive 1TB, just it's cheaper with family package... Than Google or others. I do know idrive or pcloud, but idrive or pcloud in Linux isn't great in bisync using rclone... 😢
I work at a startup, and simply started using Linux once I became valuable. Nobody could really say much
What kind of business? The only place I worked that ran exclusively Linux, i.e. not in a VM on top of Windows, was Opera Software. Everybody got to install and manage their own computer, which might not be ideal from a security standpoint.
Most places I've worked use Linux VM:s on top of Windows, I'm guessing probably because management and/or the IT department only knows Windows and can't imagine life without it :/ Subsequently the vast majority of issues have been either directly related to Windows/Office/Teams, or accessing Windows shared drives etc. from Linux.
Vagrant seemed pretty convenient when deploying identical development environments, if that could be of any help to you.
Non-IT. Which makes it harder. Just a mid size distribution business. The thing is we're from Myanmar and everyone's so used to cracked proprietory software, even big companies. Got virus? Reinstall everything.
Now we're trying to make everything legit and licensing fees are getting a bit much, especially O365. For now I'm just trying to push non-power users toward libreoffice.
Making people use Google Docs is much easier.
Working at a small software company for the summer, the dev team I'm on all uses Linux - there isn't even a setup for windows. Don't know how that decision was made though, it was way before my time. But it was very nice to come in and see a thinkpad with kubuntu on it.
Other teams use windows though, QA and some non-technical roles like sales.
There's a lot of Microsoft stuff used (office, teams) but the web apps work fine, and we do most stuff in slack anyway.
I run an Ubuntu laptop for work [system engineer] by choice. I have to write stuff and interact with the 200 or so linux servers daily. For work, it's perfect. For doing anything corporate, it's a fucking nightmare. Thankfully the good outweighs the bad but stuff like VPNs, remote desktop, all that stuff works terribly.
I imagine that Canonical is using it. In reality, i am just commenting here as i am also interested!
The company I work at has ~100 employees at our location (there are other locations too, but they each work rather independently).
We primarily use Windows throughout the company, but anyone who wants can run Linux. So we have ~20 people or so running Linux.
It's primarily people in Software Engineering that use Linux, and here mostly devs and devops. In these areas there is more than enough software for Linux, so that's not an issue. We sadly use Microsoft's office stuff a lot, so we have Teams, Exchange and their cloud stuff. So on Linux we use teams-on-linux and Prospect Mail (third-party wrapper apps for Microsoft's cloud stuff), and they work about as well as you'd expect third-party wrappers for Microsoft's cloud stuff. Screen sharing apparently still doesn't work on Wayland, so X11 it is.
A big hurdle is the DPI (=>deep packet inspection) solution that is used in the office, since it doesn't play nice with Linux for some reason. That took a while to get to work correctly.
DPI? There are at least 4 expansions for that.
Sorry, DPI = Deep packet inspection, not Dots per inch. Just when reading your comment I noticed the possible confusion.
I'm interested in this as well. Also is anyone using libre accounting or crm software? Gnucash seems legit, I've never used the foss crm stuff but it also seems good from the outside
We've been using a customized ERPNext for about 7 years though. But it's just a web-based application, so any client's fine.
Work in Education and Software Industries.
I did manage fleet of Ubuntu and RHEL/Fedora instance. Mostly in education is research based services on top of container, either docker swarm or openshift. Most tech stack is PHP, Python for ML, and NodeJS
In software industries, I use kubernetes, and tech stack Nodejs, c#/net core, php, Java, python, golang, and some other popular language. Mostly using microservices arch, with DDD-MVC approach.
In education we have 10-20 Ubuntu/RHEL/Fedora for production, in Uni Labs, we have fleet (more than 20) of Gnome desktop with RHEL, supported by Red Hat Academy APAC. We do dual boot with windows because some WPF/.NET Desktop development lecture still held, but with Avalonia and React Native, seems it will change near future.
In software industries, mostly developer use windows, but they do debug on WSL2. Only small percentage using Linux desktop. Some are using mac, but it's under 3 people, negligible. Well...
For Education, it need about 7 years to fully moved from Windows server 2012, using Full Linux. In past some lab do have MacOS server, but I never encounter or support them so.. I can't speak much.
But in software industries, from start, we have Linux box, and grow over time. We only have special windows server for SQL server that need reporting server ability, mostly tied to SAP/ERP project, the rest are in Linux Box. Mostly we use red hat ansible to make standard deployment. We do have cloud init, but only for first deployment, then ansible.
Thanks for this. Guess things will remain a bit of a mishmash even if there is a transition.
A place I used to work at, Sol1, supported Linux on the desktop for small businesses in Sydney, Australia. They're a ~10 person company and are really casual, so they'd probably be happy to answer any questions.
Google.
They have really good support people, much of the resources are shared with their infrastructure, they have their whole internal software ecosystem.
The question was about small to midsize companies though...
K, my current startup then, though it's a mix of Linux and Mac and the support is just weird really, mostly we just help each other over slack.
Forgot to mention it's a non-tech company.
I just wanna know if there's any small company running mostly Linux ecosystem with some IT governance like LDAP-based authorizations and policies. There are probably clients of companies like red hat doing that, but I think they might be giant corps.
Doubtful there are many, at that scale you often outsource it and those firms do the bare minimum of mail and windows support, Linux experience is harder to come by.