Fuck Windows and Microsoft really. Today I had a meeting call through Teams first thing in the morning so I start my computer 10 minutes earlier than the call because it takes a like 3 or 4 minutes to boot and for Windows to be responsive. Windows decides to apply some past update so it takes 2 or 3 additional minutes which is fine, I am just in time for the meeting call. Well, 10 minutes into the call a notification in windows appears that the computer will restart in 5 minutes and with no option to postpone WTF. Imagine this was an important sales call, an emergency or something else critical, I might be fucked. The computer restarted I started my linux personal computer and I connect my bluetooth headphones to the it but no, they were connected to the Windows computer while it was restarting so I could not just call from it as the microphone started failing a few weeks ago. (I will just replace it, thanks Framework). So fuck my company for using Windows. Fuck Windows for developing such a nightmare OS with so shitty code. This was for sure a patch for a critical vulnerability, like always. And WTF this is Windows for a business, have a fucking super stable branch that does not need patches every other day. I don’t care about your updates to the shitty weather widget, just have a fucking working operating system that let’s me do my work. Fuck Microsoft monopolistic practices that keeps people and businesses from switching to Linux. There is no better publicity for Linux that Windows itself. Most Linux/GNU distros just let you choose when to update.
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Too many times I’ve been at the very limit of failing to deliver an assignment. I used to have classes from morning to night (used to get home at 23:00) and sometimes I did homework at uni and scan/upload in my computer since camera-scanned documents don’t look as good, so I had to deliver them ASAP, but Windows would take a LOT of time to load Teams and sometimes it started applying updates at startup, so it would be SLOW AS HELL.
Just some days ago it happened again (the homework was assigned a day before) so I booted up windows and what a surprise (/s) it started applying updates, so Teams wouldn’t even open. I had to send the files from there to my linux computer (I love you, KDE connect!) because I still had to add some things to the document and Teams for Linux loaded in a second lol
@ranovich if you just need to hop on a call and windows is giving you shit, why not join using another device?
I actually would really prefer for companies to just provide us virtual machines and I can connect to vpn and then to the work hosts. This way I can use my own setup.
Come work at Meta, we have Fedora Linux laptops :)
Edit: Maybe we should crowd source a list of companies that let you use Linux. I’ve worked at startups and straight up told the CEO “I’m installing Linux” and that has worked, but corporate companies you can’t get away with that
No thanks
Does using fedora help manipulate teenage girls into eating disorders or is that an unrelated team?
I agree.
I find the Teams app works great on Ubuntu. The Microsoft apps work OK in browser, until you have a lot of collaborators.
I rarely need to switch to windows, so when I do switch I expect to spend an hour doing updates.
Our work is the opposite. As soon as a new machine arrives we go straight to BIOS at boot, switch the settings and install Linux immediately. Windows never sees the light of day. I do feel for you as we do do sales calls and in the middle of sales calls the people that we are calling have their computers reboot on them, do an update, or I’ve just got to restart and on restart it does an update and huge amounts of time are wasted on those people.
Windows probably costs the world millions a day in wasted, for time for shit like that.
How do you manage your fleet? How big is your network?
I‘d love to push for Linux at work, but have yet to see a solution with similar management capabilities than a Windows domain. And I don’t want to manage individual clients, as sysadmin I want to push templates like GPOs and the like.
Can see it work for smaller environments, but not in a company with a couple hundred machines.
I work in a higher ed org that uses a mix of (mostly) Red Hat servers and Windows & Mac endpoints; the Linux-focused admins use Ansible for things I’d do with either GPOs (if it’s something tried & true) or Intune (if it’s some half-baked newness and campus IT would actually give my group the permissions) in Windows.
Oh, Ansible is an interesting starting point. Would not thought of it for that purpose, I always „only“ link it mentally to automated deployment.
Will look into it out of curiosity.
Yeah, I’d never seen it used in this way either. They use it mostly to modify config files, which gives you a lot of control over most things on a Linux box. We also use it for Macs to do things like create a standardized local administrator account (since Apple doesn’t have a LAPS equivalent). It’s a pretty tangled web but we have an old-school Linux admin who keeps it all ticking (we just worry about his ticker!).
Good luck!
So I’m a total noob when it comes to business systems and I have never used ActiveDirectory or group policies, but wasn’t Linux or rather Unix originally designed as a system for many users on one big machine/network? Why is it so difficult for businesses to manage permissions and group settings on a large amount of devices? What does Microsoft/Windows do so much better there?
They have the management aspect of large environments down to a tee. Apart from costs it does not really matter if your domain consists of ten, thousand or more systems. The tools to manage those systems centralized by core systems is the same set for all sizes so to speak.
That can be on one campus, across multiple cities and locations. It’s quite frankly IMO the foundation on which the success of Windows in the corporate world is built. Standardized deployment of settings across all company systems saves administrators time which can be used for other tasks instead of micromanaging clients.
I have yet to see a similar solution for Linux clients that works the same way.
It was originally one computer that everyone connected to, it wasn’t a fleet of separate computers like Windows PCs.
And there is probably no simple way to set up a system that would function in a way that Linux needs I guess?
I heard Ubuntu got some big upgrades starting with 22.04 in terms to support for GPOs.
I never tested it personally but they do have some documentation for it and they can be added to a Windows domain: https://documentation.ubuntu.com/adsys/en/latest/
One place I worked at just gave people Linux computers without telling them and disabled the boot image. The job was mostly online Salesforce, so Chrome got them through everything. Imaging was a breeze. We even made it kinda look like windows. No one really commented on it. We didnt hide it from anyone but we didnt go out of our way to make a big deal out of it.
Linux works when people stop thinking of it as “Linux”. Its “Android” or “Steam OS” or “My smart TV” etc… All you need to do is rename it and suddenly they are ok with it.
Oh, hell no. We are absolutely tiny.
It’s very much a trust-based situation as we all work together and in a small team.
I would actually love to know how to handle remote shutdown of PCs and lock out and things like that, for as we do grow, we are getting busier, and starting to expand.
I’ve only worked at one software company where devs where allowed to install Linux as their OS. It was awesome… except when there was an update and then you had an urgent request from management while you where fixing what the update broke
funny how with sooooo many updates, Windows are still very vulnerable. You buy a Windows PC, you better equip Antivirus software too; it is like bread and butter. On Linux and also Mac, you never need to worry about these things.
because it takes a like 3 or 4 minutes to boot
What kind of PC is this? Does it have an SSD?
My one year old Dell Latitude with a fast SSD needs about 8 minutes every morning to boot windows and start all that security crap that company IT has put on there.
Haha that’s on your shitty IT dept. I’m sure the OS has very little to do with it
If windows didn’t have such horrible security and a kernel shoddily stacked on top of an MS-DOS base, IT depts wouldn’t need to install very invasive software like crowdstrike. Windows 11 also only boots up quick if it’s your daily driver and you have fast boot enabled (which isn’t always desirable).
Windows hasn’t been based on DOS for almost 30 years.
I have a channel on my team’s Slack were I just vent off on these kind of situations 😬
#windows-is-the-best, inspired from #gitlab-is-the-best, the chan were everyone vents off when the CI refuses to pick up workers 😅
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I separated in paragraphs but I did not preview to see that it needs a double enter for a new line
:(
I also use Windows at work, and it is driving me insane. The updates can be annoying, but it is mostly just how fucking slow it is. Directories routinely take mulitple seconds to load, and I don’t understand why. I also just prefer Gnome in general, but I do think the Window’s user interface as a whole is pretty good when it works. I will say, WSL works well for the things I want to run “in linux”, and it integrates very nicely with VS Code.
I can actually install Linux if I want. They provide instructions for how to roll it in to Intune etc, and I will probably try it, but keep a dual boot to Windows available for when I really need it. The problem is that my job is married to Office, which doesn’t have native linux support at all. We ues OneDrive, Outlook, Teams and collaborative Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Most of these probably run okay enough in browser, but especially for big Word documents where we need to make sure formatting is okay (a nightmare in Word even without multiple users editing the document at once), I am not sure if it works well enough. Rclone can be used to sync to OneDrive. For now I just try to avoid making office documents whenever possible, sticking to markdown, latex and csv files etc., store as much as possible on our i.e. our GitLab instance instead, and hopefully it will it will be easier to switch over time.
I also wonder what would happen if Donny wakes up one day, decides he wants to invade Europe or something and all our Office 365 licenses suddenly stop working. We would have a lot of other bigger issues of course, so it’s not the most critical issue.
Your workplace probably doesn’t want to spend millions (depending on size) teaching their employees how to use the terminal.
Users don’t even know how they organize their files, the difference between sharepoint, teams or onedrive. Of course they can’t use a terminal but they would never need to like users in windows don’t handle updates, their IT do.
When basic tasks like changing the scaling, setting a default power profile, or a default audio device, or just installing software doesn’t require use of the terminal, call me back.
Okay, give me a number and I’ll call you now.
You can do all that with KDE without using the terminal.
But, I won’t talk about software because even distributions have their own way to install them without terminal and there is flatpak from a corporate perspective you dont want users to install software on their own.
Okay mr “I love Linux but clearly have not used it in 15 years”
What year is it? Terminal is pretty much optional these days, especially if we’re talking enterprise with dedicated IT staff.
I’m no Windows fanboy but I have to use it quite a lot, at home and at work. I don’t know what versions or settings you guys have set up but I’ve never had a Windows update I can’t postpone, ever.
In corporate managed fleet of PCs updates are pushed by the company internal management systems. Some companies give you a 24hours option, some others (ahem, power tripping sysadmins, I know, I was one) say “fuck you and your work, you install when I say so”. It’s not strictly a Windows thing, it’s a company policy.
Depends on the settings your IT has set up… Mine will let you put it off, but after a couple times you’re left with no choice but to let it run.
Windows also used to show me the ugly face of Trump in the start menu even if I didn’t ask for it. That was more than 4 years ago. Recently was accidentally hovering over some ‘copilot’ button in Edge of a friend. And again - pop-up with Trump. So yes: fuck Windows, fuck Microsoft
Wow, that is some nightmare fuel type shit. That’s actually crazy.
