cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100
Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.
As much as if saddens me to write it: the enterprise bullshit.
I’m not allowed to use Linux at work because it’s more complicated than the out of the box experience of MacOS and windows in terms of remote management, encryption enforcement, company certificates and all this useless bullshit.
yeah corporate environments continue to be a pain point. IT wants centralised management a la intune/GPE, i want to be able to use proper terminal tools for automation.
last time it came to a head i moved into a vm and refused to come out for two years.
And I’m not sure why Linux doesn’t excel in a centrally managed environment, since it descends from an OS that was designed from the ground up to be used by many users in an enterprise environment.
Desktop management wasn’t, and isn’t, a priority. Managing fleets of servers has been the focus, and the Linux vendors make most of their money selling server distros.
It can be done, but it has to be built using the raw tools available. This is a strength and a weakness. Strength because it’s super flexible, and a weakness because random IT person has to know what they’re doing.
There are some projects like FreeIPA, Gnome FleetCommander, SaltStack, and Foreman which have parts. There’s nothing turn key like Intune or Jamf though. Plus this is all based on on-prem stuff. We’re not even touching on Entra replacements.
There are a few closer to turnkey solutions available now, scalefusion & 42gears to name a couple of providers.
Often times it’s more about visibility rather than absolute control - tools like osquery support Linux as well.
Really just needs one vendor to provide a unified way of configuring and managing a fleet of laptops/desktops. All of the bits exist, just needs someone to bring it all together
Because Microsoft office
Office, teams, SSO, SharePoint… You get a very interesting package of features from Microsoft of you are a company. And most integrations with services exist for MS SSO, so its sadly easy.
About 15 years ago I used to run my work desktop Windows in a VMware instance on Linux. We had Redhat and VMware licenses too use. I swear it ran faster than on bare metal for some reason. I used VMware’s virtual apps for Outlook and IE.
These days i just run what they hand me. No point getting on the bad side of the admins.