I’m liking the recent posts about switching to Linux. Some of my home machines run Linux, and I ran it on my main laptop for years (currently on Win10, preparing to return to Linux again).
That’s all fine and dandy but at work I am forced to use Windows, Office, Teams, and all that. Not just because of corpo policies but also because of the apps we need to use.
Even if it weren’t for those applications, or those policies, or if Wine was a serious option, I would still need to work with hundreds of other people in a Windows world, live-sharing Excel and so on.
I’m guessing that most people here just accept it. We use what we want at home, and use what the bossman wants at work. Or we’re lucky to work in a shop that allows Linux. Right?
Nope.
No. We are a proper engineering company.
Lol what kind of engineering? Because it probably isn’t mechanical, electronics, or civil because most of those programs don’t work in Linux 😂
I have dreams of KiCAD and FreeCAD becoming good enough to be used a lot in industry and kiCAD is nearly there, but missing tons of productivity and collaboration features, but altium is still pretty ubiquitous, spaghetti code garbage that it can be.
So not an industrial automation engineer. Nothing but windows software.
Ignition for scada works on Linux, but nothing else does.
As an engineer, piss off with this pretentious crap.
Thinkpads running Linux for the staff.
We use open-source. Our own on-prem servers running Linux. A lot of our software is also open source. Our git, our office suite, our video and chat… All open source.
We just got rid of our Google Cloud connections a few months ago, but we’re still reliant on aws, cloudflare, etc.
LOL, spotted the “windows engineer”.
Yeah, have fun making stuff when the device you’re using to do so is actively fighting you
Full Linux shop here. Love it…
Desktops, laptops, servers.
For those rare customer teams meets, we just do it in the browser.
</saltRub>
How big is your install base at work? Still wondering how to replace something like Active Directory, Group Policies and the like for centralized management akin to Windows based networks.
FreeIPA does a passable job at replacing AD for the absolute most basic functions. I used to use it for sudo rules and user management at one of my previous jobs, even though it wasn’t a Linux shop.
FreeIPA covers most scenarios. Kerberos, Dynamic DNS/DNS, LDAP.
GPO equivalency would need some config management tool. Ansible is what RH would suggest, but something with an agent would probably be better.
I use an unofficial teams appimage all day every day.
I think its probably an electron thing.
I hate having to use it but it works fine.
my employer using windows on their machine is their problem. i could be faster via bash in several instances, wouldn’t have to wait ours for updates to be done … but i get to drink tea and listen to complaints about outlook from my co-workers.
it’s okay. i get paid.
Yeah getting paid to sit there while windows wastes 20+ minutes of company time updating is always a treat
“Do the least amount of work for the most amount of pay you can”
Windows is a win for the proletariat at work. Linux was made for the proletariat for the revolution.
My university forces us to use Microsoft products and I hate it.
The only good thing is that most MS products are available through web browser nowadays, but they have random quirks that make me bash my head against the desk.
We’re using exclusively MacOS at work, with the exception of one windows device which is pretty quarantined from the rest. I would not accept a job offer from a windows-only company. My mental health is more important to me
Yes, but maybe it’s not so bad. It creates a clear separation between work and play. Windows is for boring work and office stuff. Linux is the happy place at home.
I’m a Linux sysadmin. I was issued a Windows laptop. But I have been allowed to add a second NVME drive to it that has Debian 12 installed. So Debian 12 has been my main working environment.
I also have a desktop in my cube running Windows.
I rarely boot my laptop to windows. But if I need to do something with modifying Windows smb shares or active directory I just remote into my Windows Desktop. I’m also running a ssh server on my windows desktop so about half of my windows active directory work is done via powershell over ssh.
I believe to be the only one running linux on the work laptop at the company. I told them I’d like to use linux when I applied and they told me “fine, but you will have to install and maintain it on your own, we have no support personal for this”.
I installed arch linux and have been happy for years. MS Teams runs in my browser.
I had that a couple of jobs ago, but since then I’ve been stuck with Mac or Windows depending on the employer. I understand their reasoning, but it’s annoying. At my current organisation, I use WSL2 (which I was allowed to install for Docker support), and I do everything except the corporate stuff in that. So Edge, Teams, Outlook, whatever proprietary VPN we use at the time on the host, all my actual development work on WSL. It’s mostly fine.
Same here :)
Office 365 and teams work fine on Linux in Chrome or Firefox, including voice calls, video calls and screen sharing, and notifications with pop-ups and sounds.
Excel, in particular, is 100% inside Office365 in the browser when I have to interact with it. In the past, I have created Excel files in LibreOfffice and uploaded them to Office365 to convert. Though I haven’t been tempted to do so in a few years.
Most of my coworkers are not aware that I run Linux at work. My boss knows and doesn’t care. My peers are just surprised when I mention it, because I use the same tools without issue.
Zoom works great on Linux, as well, both in bowers and as the native app. Many corporate VPNs are compiant with open standards, and so don’t even require any additional install. Cisco’s isn’t made right, but they provide a Linux client that works fine.
Slack works fine in browser, including full first class notifications. I haven’t sought out a dedicated client app, but I recall having some options.
DropBox and Google have particularly decent Linux client applications, and of course, fully functional web tools.
There’s also some excellent ways to run Android apps nearly seemlessly inside an Android emulator of Linux. In theory, I could resort to those, but I haven’t because everything I need works in a web browser now.
I’ve heard that the two glaring exceptions are AutoCad and Adobe Creative Suite. I understand that neither works on Linux or in a browser (per other threads on Lemmy).
Oh yeah, and Linux has more and better ways to produce nice PDFs than Windows does, and of course reads them without issue
Oh, and yes, mandatory compliance stuff like antivirus tools and CrowdStrike also have compliant options for Linux. Some of the really shitty spyware level invasive stuff probably hasn’t been ported to Linux, but the “keep me virus free” stuff seems pretty available - because they want to sell copies for Linux servers.
Edit: If this seems needlessly thorough, it is because I worked to independently verify all of these details before my upgrade. I figure my notes might help someone making the case to switch, or just researching whether they need to not switch.
Linux has more and better ways to produce nice PDFs than Windows does
Go on…
Fair enough!
Conversion
First, I haven’t yet encountered a pre-existing document on Linux that didn’t turn into a nice PDF when fed into “Print - Save as PDF”, which I have found to be present by default on Gnome and KDE (the two most popular desktop environments). So for the majority of distros, Print to PDF is pre-installed and available.
For advanced use cases, there’s Pandoc. Pandoc can convert most document formats to many other formats, and gives fine grained control over every step.
Authoring PDFs
For authoring a quick PDF, there’s LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
And of course there’s GnuImp, Krita, and so many more options for editing some images to add in.
Most distros ship with LibreOfffice or OpenOffice, and at least one image editor.
But I do recommend investigating some free and open image editors. There’s many use cases and twice as many options. If the default isn’t for you, what you need may be one (free) Software search away.
But can I just use plain text? (Yes)
For control freaks like me, there’s also a whole ecosystem of tools that work well with Markdown, ASCIIDoc, LaTex, and ReStructuredText.
For the curious, start by trying VSCodium with a Markdown extension.
You can tune your extensions here, but I think I recall “Markdown All-In-One” getting me all the way from raw text to nice enough looking PDFs in one command. Maybe it was two, using the built in “Print to PDF” dialog.
Once again, PanDoc is the powerhouse of this use case, and many excellent tools are available.
Windows Sysadmin. My job is to enjoy the eternal arms race against Cortana every update via GPO and registry hacks. We are running on malware, it’s a joke.
And before you ask, I am a peon and “Have we considered Linux?” was an office meme years before I arrived.
Software engineer. Last company that made me use Windows was one I left 3 years ago I think. Since then it’s been MacOS or LInux, and I love both. I actually prefer Linux at home and MacOS for work. Just add brew (obviously) and a tiling window manager and I’m done. With Linux at home I tinker more, I actually used to use Gentoo for gaming…
Debian at home. Red Hat at work. I have tried to talk them into better OS choices, but really I’m just glad to not be on Windows.
Why not the same at both?
We in engineering are allowed to use whatever the heck we want so long as IT agrees that it is useful and safe and costs less than other options.
So we run a bunch of open source stuff. But the biggest one is Python. We connect arduinos and rpies to run complex machines. Meanwhile CAD runs on windows unfortunately along with all the bullshit spreadsheet, word and PowerPoint.
Linux is awesome and I see Windows day’s numbered. So long piece of shit obsolescence software! One day you will be no more.
Professor here facing the same problem. I am bounded by administrative procedures with grandma school administrators.
I use Linux at home, of course. Debloated my Win11 machine at work but hope to use Linux instead everyday.
Would requesting a mac with the argument of having access to a Unix shell potentially work? In college my IT instructor used a Mac with a windows VM via VMware Workstation and it pretty seemless. He’d use the Mac for most stuff then jump over to the Windows VM for windows specific stuff, and then diving into the native Bash shell for anything else. Honestly it was a pretty sweet setup
