Hello everyone, my company (our department is of around 150+ developers/machine learning people/researchers) is currently considering switching from Windows to Gnu+Linux for company devices (as in the machines we use in our daily work) and we are currently in the phase of collecting requirements. I’m not in charge of the process or involved in the decision phase, but as an enthusiast I’m curious about it. We handle data and other sensitive resources, so the environment should remain managed by the IT department (what’s possible to install, VPNs, firewalls, updates and similar). What do companies generally use in this kind of scenario? I’m assuming they generally do some stuff with either Canonical or Red Hat, but are there alternatives? Are there ways to do something that works across distributions by using flatpak or the nix package manager? What are your experiences?
OpenSUSE can also be considered.
YaST has so many awesome funktions
Btw if Enterprise support is needed SLE Desktop is probably better than OpenSUSE
There are numerous ways to approach this.
Canonical:
- Cheap finance-wise
- Low upfront cost skill-wise
- Medium ongoing cost skill-wise
- Occasionally breaks without being touched
RedHat:
- Medium cost finance-wise
- Low upfront cost skill-wise
- Medium ongoing cost skill-wise
- RedHat is not what it used to be. Has QA been sacked?
And, of course, my favourite 😁
Gentoo:
- Cheap finance-wise
- High upfront cost skill-wise
- Medium ongoing cost skill-wise
- Only breaks when multiple warnings are ignored
From my experience, though - you’ll probably end up on Ubuntu. Because everyone knows it, right?
Yep, Ubuntu was mentioned as an example in a few meetings and I think they will end up doing that. And it’s fine, give me literally anything other than Windows and I will be happy, however I’m a spoiled kid, so I also don’t really want Ubuntu.
The disappointing thing about Ubuntu is that the Ubuntu in everyone’s minds is very different from Ubuntu that’s actually getting installed. Snap is atrocious on desktop. Random inconsistencies across a fleet on a few hundred identical desktops. A dodgy campaign to onboard everyone onto Ubuntu Pro (I don’t mind them charging for a service, but the way they do it is disgusting.). Incredibly inflexible if you want more than just the barebones desktop.
Every day there’s something annoying popping up.
In terms of ease of management and deployment NixOS might be an interesting option. It can be completely configured through a single file so the deployment and update processes become very straightforward and easy to manage in a centralised fashion.
I was thinking about that myself, but is there a way to remotely update configuration.nix and rebuild, if the requirements change? For example, if some dev wants to use Geany instead of Vscode and Admin is like “Yeah, why not”, how would that be implemented?
Sure. Pick any orchestration solution you like. Ansible, for example. You’d just change the file that is rolled out for that machine, either by changing some central, per-machine file or its ansible file, then tell ansible to update the file remotely and make it run nixos-rebuild switch on that machine. A few seconds later the tool is installed. If you replaced vscode with geany vscode would be uninstalled, too.
I would consider a git repo of a few standard configurations and switch them to a config that had it, or possibly maintain individual configs per user. Your orchestration would need to reference the git repo so when you need to add software XYZ to everyone’s machine you don’t have to re-run all of the individual playbooks and deal with the hassle of remembering who needed which playbook ran.
Putting on my enterprise hat, most companies are going to want some form of paid support. Canonical and Suse are probably the two trustworthy players in that space (from an enterprise perspective, I really don’t trust Canonical) now that RedHat has developed some form of paranoia. If it were up to me I’d push for SUSE. I think Nix is super great and fantastic but I’m a DevOps engineer, not a support desk engineer, so I view deployments and support differently than someone who has to answer questions about how to open email
We’re running Linux on the vast majority of PCs at my job. We used to run Lubuntu, but switched to Debian. You can use pam_mount so user folders are mounted from a server at login, to create a “roaming profiles” environment. But there really isn’t a great solution for laptop users that might be away from the office.
If you do use pam_mount, don’t mount their entire home folder. That will end up throwing a bunch of stuff on the server, like chrome temporary internet files, and their .config folder, that just aren’t needed on the server and will slow everything down. Just mount their individual Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Videos, Desktop, etc. folders.
We’re a small business, we don’t have any Enterprise Support or anything like that.
Just mount their individual Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Videos, Desktop, etc. folders.
You could use Seafile (custom server and client) or something like NextCloud (actually just WebDav server and client) to sync those folders. Works perfectly on laptops and if you sync, you don’t need a good network all the time. (And since the laptop is a personal devices, you only sync 1 user or maaaybe a small number)
