Comment by deadbunny
8 years ago
Because Windows is foisted upon people in corporate environments. Not everyone gets to run their OS of choice.
8 years ago
Because Windows is foisted upon people in corporate environments. Not everyone gets to run their OS of choice.
Good point - as Mel Brooks said, "It's good to be the king!" In my last job, I was IT; I dread going to some place where they force Windows upon me!
I work at a very corporate place with forced windows laptops. There are zero systems in the company we can sit down at and log into, except our laptops. The OS version is updated, and upgraded, automatically, even including major versions. I was just force upgraded to windows 10 and lost support for my programming environment. I had to recreate it in a new toolset because the one I have a thousand hours in is no longer supported. (It would work, it's just not supported - I cannot install it, but it would work fine if I could).
One arm of my company allows macs. This one does not, period. We have a 0% non windows 10 user base. We can have temporary admin access for 12 hours if we will out a report, but everything we do is recorded. It doesnt work if we're on wifi or battery. We are not allowed to install browser extensions, even if we are developing against the web.
My last job let everyone have admin/root. I had everything I ever wanted. My workflow was glorious. I was so comfortable. I was able to work 3 to 4 times faster on average, i.e. my yearly output was probably 3 to 4 times more productive. I invented new things, scratched my itches, and felt like the king of the world.
But this job will let me retire.
Our laptops are all Windows based and I've moved all of my development to VMs that I have admin rights over. I don't think I'd ever go back at this point regardless of what my desktop OS was.
It really helps with new developer onboarding as well. You can just provide them with a handful of VMs instead of spending time configuring a new machine with all of the dev tools your team uses.
I work in the public sector and our sysadmins have actually made a game out of tricking people into updating to Windows 10 (and allowing them to take back admin rights in the process). Like offering Office 2016 upgrades, but only if you upgrade to Windows 10 too.
I understand it’s much easier for them to manage things this way, but they’re not going to have the results they want by going about it this way. When my Windows 10 “upgrade” comes, I’ll just be dedicating one of my monitors to my own Arch (maybe Qubes) box where I can actually get shit done. I’m a C# dev too, which makes even less sense, but requesting permission to install simple dev tools is not going to happen. Life is too short for this nonsense.
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Honest question: Why did you take the job? I've heard such horror stories from previous companies of current coworkers as well, but they didn't suffer as much as non-developers. I myself make it a point to ask in job interviews whether I will be able to install and administrate my OS of choice.
It was foisted on me, but I created a group in our approved software policy with just me in it, added Virtualbox to the group and managed to get the change request signed off! I use Ubuntu now for everything but MS Office and the dreaded ERP client.
good lord. I would've gone the hyper-v route, that comes with Windows 10 pro, doesn't it? (another linux only user here, so idk). Should perform better than Virtualbox too
I found out the hard way that Hyper-V prevents other virtualization software from running, notably including the x86 Android emulator.
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Hyper-V sucks on the Desktop. Too many features missing to allow good integration between Windows host and Linux. (Like Clipboard sharing, shared folders etc.)
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> I would've gone the hyper-v route, that comes with Windows 10 pro, doesn't it?
There's 2 huge things missing from the Hyper-V integration client (LIS) when running Linux with a GUI in a VM which makes it a non-starter:
1) There is no cut and paste between Windows and a Linux Hyper-V VM.
2) There is no way to resize a Linux Hyper-V VM window. The most you can do is to set it at boot time and the max size is 1920x1080.
Kind of a pity since Hyper-V itself works very well.
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Still on windows 7 at work, so doesn't help. Ubuntu runs beautifully under Virtualbox, but this is not true of all Linux distro's. I have had problems with Mint for instance.
In fact Ubuntu is so good in Virtualbox that I even get away with running HN's hated Electron apps in the VM!
Obviously somebody in those corporations chose it.
Running a large fleet of non-Windows computers means writing your own software to manage them, just like Google had to do [0]. Not every business wants to do that.
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2013/11/27/how-google-manages-over-40000...
Assuming a Linux fleet you can use config management tools just as easily for desktops as servers.
Part of this though is because software was historically built for windows in a way that it isn't anymore. Even at tech companies, where the majority of employees are using macbooks, you'll often see people in the finance department using windows machines.
I imagine as the growth of SaaS continues we will see less of this, especially because it's much easier for the IT department to manage one type of computer where macs tend to have a higher build quality than most windows based machines.
I'm working now to move my Win 8 install to a VM then I can format this damn machine an install a real OS. All I need Windows for really is Skype and MS Teams.
Foisted is a very apt term