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?
sure am and it fucking sucks
just today I ran into a new issue - when you try to close an Excel document without saving, it asks if you want to merge your changes with the server.
I do not, I want to close without saving, so I choose no.
then it asks if I want to save the document.
I do not, I want to close without saving, so I choose don’t save
The document finally closes. I reopen the document, and guess what’s there? my unsaved changes. if I try to close the document, the cycle repeats.
Microsoft fucking removed the ability to close a document without saving
I tried this on Windows 10 on one computer and Windows 11 on another computer with the exact same behavior
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.
I’m a teacher and I make Linux work for me. Open doc formats get converted to pdf for the shitty windows 7 running the printer in the printing room, and the Android/Windows only app for communications I just run on my phone. PPTs run fine. When there was a problem with the projector, ‘IT guy’ went to my laptop, got confused (it’s Gnome), I told him not to interfere with it because it’s Linux. He proceeded to say ‘Ah, not working because it’s not windows.’ Later that day he actually came to fix the cable to the projector.
There’s few things more satisfying than having the “IT guy” say “oh it must be a Linux problem” only for them to have to eat crow within 24 hours.
Yes, I’m forced to use Windows at work and that’s part of why I only use Linux in my personal life.
Window is so stupid and annoying. It needs to reboot like twice a day for updates. Not to mention individual apps that need to update in the middle of usage. Also the news/spam and stuff. It’s garbage. I’m the guy who’s constantly telling everybody that we should switch to Linux.
(Also, even though my work laptop is Windows, I do most of my real work connected to a Linux server/IDE.)
even though my work laptop is Windows, I do most of my real work connected to a Linux server/IDE.
This has been me for my entire pro career. There we are, working to maintain at&t Unix, but it’s all (then) vandyke, winamp, Mozilla4. Here I am now, at work, corp win11, putty, radiogarden, fucking outlook/teams and all its dreck.
But look at bazzite and Nobara: if we can avoid the snaps/appimages/flatpaks in addition to the venvs and npm and other toxic cult cargo sploit vectors, we have a strong platform with still just enough windows access for fucking teams and the rest of the redmond-based data sovereignty threats.
I use an M2 Caddy with a 1TB NVME SSD to boot into Aurora Linux on my work laptop.
The laptop keeps it’s Windows license intact and when I need to move to a new laptop, it’s plug and
playwork.CUPS works with every printer in my office out of the box.
I am the user with less IT support tickets, I don’t require Windows, Office nor Adobe licenses.
IT is happy, I’m happy. Every day is pure bliss.
Why would the “Windows license” get affected by whatever it on the disk?
Also how your sysadmins keeping the uefi unlocked?
M2 Caddy?
M.2 Caddy
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
My biggest issue with Windows is the lack of control I have of the actual hardware I own. I don’t own my work computer to begin with nor am I entitled to have full control over it so it doesn’t matter.
I do use WSL, but mainly because I’m more familiar with Bash than Powershell and don’t have to constantly figure out how Powershell does things I already know how to do.
It’s the same reason I have no problem using my company’s OneDrive for work files when I go out of my way to avoid putting any of my personal data on the cloud. It’s their data and they don’t care so I don’t care either.
It’s also nice because I can set up a Linux-only file server at home with things like SSHFS and the Windows computer can’t even see it since it has no SSH access doesn’t even support the network share protocol. If I had an SMB share it would show up on my work computer because it autodetects it.
Yes you are right, usually linux users that are not in IT have no choice but using bad microsoft computers (or Apple for designers/upper upper management) when they are employees.
But if you are general manager, or an independant contractor, you do whatever you want, and I have been on Debian, Void since 3 years now and it is just great.
People complain that “your files are not compatible” (i.e.: their excel version can not open a moderately complex xlsx file), and you use stupidly dumb webapp for Outlook and Teams, but otherwise if you don’t need to commit for a specific software (built for windows or mac, like Adobe suite, 2D or 3D CAD softwares, some kind of old school ERP or CRM), you are all good. Basically everything done by management staff can be done using LibreOffice.
The “cloud revolution” at least has given us this good result : you can have basic business utilities solved through a webclient, hence GNU/Linux OS is ok to work with.
Yes, and I’m forced to bring Win11 home if I need to work remotely because they allegedly would need to install drivers (?) on and reconfigure their firewall for me to use the Linux Cisco VPN client? So it’s too much work.
I have a small homelab and I’ve never had to install drivers to support another operating system connecting. I also don’t have to pay a subscription for access points and can reconfigure them myself so maybe it’s a Cisco thing.
If a company is particular about me using Windows for work, I’ll be particular about choosing a company that uses Linux for work. But I’m in a unique/privileged position in this regard; my job involves making it easier for people to use Linux for business or personal use.
Good luck on that job search.
Yes. There’s no way my work would ever change.
They are trying to embrace ai slop, they sure as hell wont go away from win 11, that would take smarts.
Plus, cad, navisworks, revit, wont run on linux.
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.
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 :)
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
