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Office workers - Has anyone here convinced their boss to let them install a Linux distro on their work desktop?

Going from Windows to Linux then back to windows sucks.

Edit; Going through the comments it seems it doesn’t matter so long as IT supports the operating system, which is fair, in my scenario I’m not involved with our systems-management/IT/developers unless it’s an update to the software we use.

My desktop at work is still Windows 10 and while it works, kinda, my keyboard shortcuts are almost entirely different, I’ve encountered numerous moments where switching tab either by alt-tabbing or by the taskbar not working at all forcing me to minimize everything till I find that tab, couple times it wouldn’t even boot.

I started unplugging the Ethernet cable when I leave for work so IT can’t do any behind the scenes when I’m away.

I dredd the day they force a win 11 desktop on me.

105 comments
  • As an engineer, yes. I managed to get a pilot program off the ground at my last company. As a recently public company with a lot of IT debt, the biggest challenge was around making those devices compliant with security and IT processes, and easy for IT to provision and monitor.

    It helped that I made an effort to build good connections into IT and IT leadership. The clincher was a clear proposed timeline, a commitment that it would not require any additional workload from IT, and that we wouldn't expand it without their sign off.

    Unfortunately, layoffs meant I couldn't roll it out beyond the initial group, and when a second round of layoffs came around I took the opportunity to leave. I haven't been looking much yet, but "allows Linux" is one of the criteria I'm measuring companies against.

  • 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 needed mine, 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 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.

  • The custom software which is absolutely required for my job is only developed for Windows. There would be no point even going to work if that software wasn't available. So I'd never ask.

    There are some people in authority who think the native windows application should be swapped for a "more modern" web/cloud-type. Which would be awful, but say they got their wish and the primary software therefor became more portable. I don't think it would be worth asking or even a good idea.

    I know the IT people have zero familiarity with Linux. Their role is to provide me a workstation that facilitates every task required by my job description. It must be stable and secure. It's a complex technical environment where each workstation interacts with other devices. Even with the most constrained, homogeneous ecology that can be arranged, there are constant hiccups that need to smoothed out. I can't be the only person who knows how to use my computer. There are aspects of the environment that are out of scope for me to know about so even if I was a much more skilled linux desktop user, it would be impossible for me to set up my own machine. It would be irresponsible for IT to allow me to run whatever on my system without their being able to properly supervise things.

    I have advocated for use of free/libre software at every chance for the workplace as a whole. I try to get people on board with switching secondary/helped applications when available. At some point in the future, I think the software we are using will be discontinued so the question of what to switch to will become live. So I am hoping to propose everyone moves to linux, or at least that we prioritize a less proprietary solution. I have some strong arguments based in our business needs. I doubt the bravery exists for a full switch to Free software (if it is even possible, which it might not be). A better plan would be to find some way to get IT comfortable with Linux first. They would need to have the skills to support all the users properly.

    At the end of the day I wish someone had done this in the 80s-90s-00s when everyone was transitioned to using the computers. Now there is so much intertia with windows and everything that goes along with it. The work would be much smoother in a linux environment but 999 individual things need to change to get there.

  • I work for a big enterprise, we have very strict policies when it comes to work PCs, no way anyone would be allowed to change the operating system.

    BUT I got permission to install Virtualbox so I can happily use Linux for many things nonetheless.

  • 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.

  • 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 officially switched my work laptop to linux after the security wonks made it impossible for me to have both network interfaces up amd connected at the same time. As a network engineer working in an airgapped lab prepping new equipment for deployment, it made it pretty hard for me to transfer and install software to the new equipment and consult online documentation. I asked, I received a non-answer, so I just did it. I don't keep it a secret, I follow all of the recommended security practices, and no one has complained to me.

  • 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.

  • I've been thinking about swapping my work laptop to Linux too.

    The difference is I'm in IT and I know what all things I need to put on my computer to make it compliant with all our policies and all the software I need to do my job.

    I've been experimenting by running some Linux VMs with all the EDR, patching, and logging software we need. But by the time I'm doing all that, there's really no point in using Linux except for the CLI which WSL has been great for that.

105 comments