Linux

working at a research institute, nobody set any restrictions for what os i install. there are guidelines, but only to make sure that people keep their os secure. i’m using fedora, my boss uses mint, a colleague uses macos. everyone is free (as long as it’s within a somewhat tight budget)

I've been sysadmin where I work for 12 years, Ive been using Linux as my OS there all that time except the first month. After that month I asked the IT manager if he cared what OS I use. He said he didn't care so long as it didn't impede me getting the work done. The junior sysadmin who started a year ago now also uses Linux and my manager wishes he could too (he does too much Microsoft office to get away with it)

As an engineer, yes. I managed to get a pilot program off the ground at my last company. As a recently public company with a lot of IT debt, the biggest challenge was around making those devices compliant with security and IT processes, and easy for IT to provision and monitor.

It helped that I made an effort to build good connections into IT and IT leadership. The clincher was a clear proposed timeline, a commitment that it would not require any additional workload from IT, and that we wouldn't expand it without their sign off.

Unfortunately, layoffs meant I couldn't roll it out beyond the initial group, and when a second round of layoffs came around I took the opportunity to leave. I haven't been looking much yet, but "allows Linux" is one of the criteria I'm measuring companies against.

I can't even install Rust...

Fun story, started at a new company as a software engineer. Default device is windows, with maybe a mac if you specifically ask for it/have a need for it.

However, turns out the person in charge of IT is super chill and lets you install what you want on your on risk. Fair deal as I am not developing super critical infrastructure.

In a large organization, IT team/Organization policy will never allow to let you use Linux as your OS unless it is required for project or mandated by client.

With ransomware attacks on ever rise, IT will always try to control all aspects of your office laptop/desktop. As they think they got it sorted for Windows, they will fight tooth and nail if you ever submit it ticket to get your OS replaced with Linux without project requirements.

In my view, as long as I'm allowed to install whatever on my personal devices even while working from home, I'm fine.

Office devices aren't really my property. For me, Windows during office hours, and Linux thereafter.

To me it's the opposite, my boss (and owner of the company) is frustrated that we cannot install linux due to some technical requirements. It is possible to change that, but this will require reshaping of the entire work process

Most places I've been at have only OS restrictions when the corporate IT doesn't support it. To be honest, while not perfect, WSL on Windows is great.

What is your job?

I failed at convincing anyone at every company I’ve worked with. Getting a MacBook is the only alternative for me.

That’s really dependent on how your work manages user workstations. If your employer is big enough to have managed endpoints, you’ll need to convince your IT department, not just your boss. They’ll have to be able to officially support it (compatibility, updates, security, legal, etc.) and that also requires approval from higher ups.

Didn't need to, our developers work on Linux because that's what their tooling uses.

Granted it's either Ubuntu LTS or RHEL because of compliance, but they make it work. Unfortunately Linux is a second-class citizen to central IT, so when they make changes, they don't really consider Linux users, they're on their own.

Used Ubuntu LTS in a VM at a bank, a tech company and now using it as an officially sanctioned OS at my workplace.

We have the option of using wsl but it's more trouble than it's worth. I think some people can request MacBooks, but it's a really drawn out process.

We typically only use RHEL for servers and kubernetes and stuff. I just put up with windows, and request a new laptop when it inevitably slows down and gets bloated.

Yes basically all of our machines are Linux.

I officially switched my work laptop to linux after the security wonks made it impossible for me to have both network interfaces up amd connected at the same time. As a network engineer working in an airgapped lab prepping new equipment for deployment, it made it pretty hard for me to transfer and install software to the new equipment and consult online documentation. I asked, I received a non-answer, so I just did it. I don't keep it a secret, I follow all of the recommended security practices, and no one has complained to me.

My work allows RHEL, but it's a specialized configuration that doesn't get updated very often. I tried it for a while but it was so out of date that I couldn't build half the tools I needed, so I ended up switching back to Windows. It was about 10-15 years ago when the C++ standard was undergoing a lot of changes, and the company-approved version of GCC was several years old and didn't support any of the newest features.

i consider myself lucky in that i've only been forced to use windows twice and both times they were okay with wsl; so i used that instead.

i'm guessing it depends on what your work is and since i've primarily worked on linux & solaris; there was no reason why i couldn't use it as my primary means for getting work done.

both times, they used the microsoft office suite (primarily outlook, word and excel) which was always problematic; but i suspec that's a permanent thing since that's still not even seemless when you have to go back an forth on those apps on a mac and windows.

Working for Danmarks meteorological institute, as a developer its default with Ubuntu, hr/finance/management use windows

At my workplace all the devs are on either Mac OS or Linux, with Mac OS being more common among Web/PHP guys and Linux among the backend devs (like me). As it turns out, given the choice, nobody actually prefers Windows. I'm still baffled by Mac OS being so common, though, at least among devs.

This works because our whole IT infrastructure is designed to be accessible via the web-browser, most of it even without VPN, via two-factor authenticated single-sign-on, most of it self-hosted (all except Teams, which obviously also needs its own authentication). This gives people the freedom to run whatever OS they like on their computers and set it up themselves, with the only requirement being to use FDE with a strong password and regularly do backups to the remote storage. We're also allowed (if not encouraged) to use the laptops for private stuff and get to keep them when they're replaced.

And as far as I can tell IT problems because of this diverse environment are surprisingly minimal and mostly with those aforementioned web services.

Yeah. I also have GrapheneOS on my work tablet

We have some platform-specific tooling. I might attempt it if they didn’t let me have a Mac at work (I remote into Win for the couple of proprietary things anyway). There’s that saying, you miss all the shots you don’t take. Go for it and see.

Would a vm work? What about live environment on a usb?

Not currently... 😢 Our final product only runs on Linux, yet we develop on macOS. Even that is super annoying because we basically have 2 different buildchains we have to maintain. I was told "the tooling works" to develop on Linux... except the tooling is slow as hell and doesn't work all the time because we have bugs (I end up debugging the tooling). If we were on Linux, we could delete all this unnecessary tooling.