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?
I was managing with virtual box on the work machine. But following win 11 the performance under hyper v is so appalling that I gave up.
In the end my solution is a 2nd hand ThinkPad off FB marketplace that I use for work.
Browser apps cover all the word/excel/outlook/teams requirements.
Winboat is covering the very limited set of other apps.
Everything else I do works better in Linux, or at least better on a device I have admin for.
Yes I am out of pocket but not significantly, and not having to deal with windows has been completely worth it for me.I count myself as one of the lucky ones that isn’t forced to use Windows by the company I work for. We even have our internal (ubuntu-based) distro, and despite being passable proficient with Linux, I can count on having support if I ever need it.
That’s all fine and dandy but at work I am forced to use Windows, Office, Teams, and all that.
Yeah, me too. But all of those (except Windows of course) can be used on the browser
In the past I mostly got to persuade them to allow me to use Linux. In one, however, they got me a macbook, so I resorted to living in the VM most of the time. I had to use xcode for some of the Mac development, but for the rest, I was masochistic enough to be able to withstand living in a VM. Though that mac was Intel based, now ARM ones would likely not perform as good to justify it. Asahi doesn’t work on newer ARM Macs AFAIK.
I’m lucky that I work from home (have done since before the pandemic) and pretty much all my work is done in a browser, and my bosses don’t care what I use as long as the work gets done. So I just work on Fedora on my regular desktop.
Nope, software dev here… work gave me a budget, told me to pick a computer and I put Linux on it. My Boss (the VP of Engineering) also runs Linux. We’re a small company and some people do run Windows but we have google workspace so there hasn’t been anything I’ve needed windows for.
In my previous job and my job at the bike shop, yes. But I don’t really care, its issues aren’t my problem.
Nah, I’m free to do what I want with my laptop as long as I can do the work. I work in IT and everyone uses windows. But so far so good. Would like to get outlook classic to run on Linux though
I’m a fucking Cloud Systems Engineer with 20 years in and at my new job IT wouldn’t give me local admin and wouldn’t approve hardly any software installation requests. Yet if I wanted to I could wipe every single customer’s data and destroy them all. Doesn’t make sense
What does those cloud systems run on? Makes sense to run the same thing, right?
I am an electrical engineer, so even beyond Teams and MS Office, several of the engineering and CAD programs we use are not supported or only partially supported on Linux (i.e. hardcoded to only work on a specific version of Ubuntu, lol).
I have spoken to our IT guy, and he would be completely on board with using Linux, but even he acknowledges that there is no reasonable path to us doing so, so I just sort of accept it.
My work computer runs Windows 11, but our IT guys have turned off pretty much all the annoying bits, so it works pretty OK.
My company is semi-large. Big enough that their IT dept semi-supports linux. My manager didn’t know about it, but after being at the company for a year using windows, I finally found the right desktop team that hooked me up with a massive document on how to install linux following corporate policy. So, now I’m rocking Ubuntu. Not in my top 10 choices, but a far cry better than the Windows 11 rollout the company warned us of.
Luckily we have business assigned Windows laptops and most of my work is done through web apps so mainly I have Teams, Outlook and Edge open. That way I get to have minimal Windows annoyances.
I recently got my Linux-laptop in a heavy MS-based company. It is enrolled via Intune and I can access all company resourcws an MS365 apps through Edge.
Apart from having to use Edge for all of that, it is a great experience compared to what I am used to.
But it took a while and a lot of complaining about being allowed to use more appropriate tools for our job. But the bottom line is: ask for it. Tell them why you need it. When they say no, try again later, document why your current setup fails and why getting a Linux-machinee would work. Maybe you will succeed. IT here has gone from “we don’t use open source” (actual quote) to giving us Linux-laptops and setting up Linux-servers on OT. They grow from this also.
The last several places I worked gave me a choice between Windows and Mac OS, so I picked Mac OS.
Forced to use Windows 11 at work, my brand new laptop with 32GB or RAM takes 10 to 20 seconds to open the explorer or view an image. It’s horrendous. It’s absolutely not because of the application I need to use because I literally do EVERYTHING in Google Chrome. This year IT uninstalled Excel and Word from our laptops because we are supposed to do all the work in Google Drive. Updates always need minimum 2 reboots and you need to attend to the computer because rebooting will get stuck on the encryption password. I hate it, but it always been like that so…
That was one of the main reasons I made the jump on my laptop. Windows was soooo slooow and ate up my 32gb like it was nothing
In the past I used CAD 95% of the time in the form of Solidworks, so I had to use windows. The other 5% of the time I used excel, so i probably could have dual booted, but I never bothered. Fortunately (kinda) my current job uses it a lot less, so I main Linux and for small prototypes I use FreeCAD on Linux and dual boot windows for the bigger projects that demand the speed in Solidworks
