If you’re not able to connect to a NAS for some reason, that’s almost definitely on you or your friend in this case. But even that aside, expecting a one to one transition has always felt odd to me… You don’t switch from an Android device to an iOS device or vice versa with the expectation of everything working one to one. You usually understand that there’s a lot of differences involved.

There’s ofc things like VR that I will admit Linux is quite far behind in, but for general use, Linux is problem-free for the most part these days. And you definitely don’t end up having an unbootable system pretty much ever unless you intentionally fuck it up. Like yeah, Linux lets me uninstall the kernel or bootloader if i choose to do that (it will try to warn me ofc) and that would render the system unbootable. But that would be me being irredeemably stupid, not the operating system’s fault. Hell, some distros like Tumbleweed even come with a better snapshotting setup than both Windows and macOS, making it pretty much impossible to fuck it up that badly.

I don’t know, I like using Fleet Commander with FreeIPA (where it stores the profile). You just spin up the template VM for whatever like-clients on the network you want to make default profiles for and make the changes, shut it down, checkbox the changes (the configurations and stuff) that you approve and let it apply the profiles across the network. Easier than depending on Puppet or Ansible playbooks IMO.

I have had issues with SSSD as well though and it had to do with Kerberos tickets but I can’t remember what I did to fix it. We’d have to manually use kinit on each machine when it’d basically fall off the realm. I want to say it was a DNS issue but it was so long ago, I just don’t remember.

We used to use Centrify for Linux and Solaris and it was easy using Access Manager to basically handle AD users and computers with Active Directory and had some GPO support (you could push config writes with GPOs for example and organize it all via OUs for example) but it would get a little wonky between trusts in the forest sometimes (in regards to zone management in Centrify) and they kept getting more expensive. Maybe they’ve fixed that stuff now but it was really simple to use and you could basically manage a lot through the AD and create group profiles in the Access Manager. I think the last straw was wanting to force us to license the entire suite regardless of whether we were using it or not. Personally, I never liked it because it wouldn’t use SSSD or kclient/nsswitch and if some service tried to join the realm/domain, it’d join using the same computer accounts and basically break the account since Centrify used its own client, so you’d specifically need to join the computer accounts via Centrify as a different name. It wasn’t detrimental or anything – just annoying that it was a problem at all. Also, sometimes the user cache database saved in specific users’ appdata that use Access Manager would corrupt from time to time and you’d need to manually delete it to use Access Manager. I’d hope they fixed that by now too though.

All and all, I’m not saying Active Directory isn’t an excellent product because it is and I’m not saying that there is a 1:1 solution for Linux but I’m saying it that in my experience it isn’t terrible either with FreeIPA and products you can use with it. I definitely hated other 389 solutions prior to FreeIPA though.