Comment by digitalsushi
8 years ago
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.
What's your opposition to Windows 10 if you're already running Windows?
We're running Windows 7 and I'm begging to get into the pilot for Windows 10. As time passes more and more things break in Windows 7 and it becomes less useful. Most of Intels drivers are garbage and their Bluetooth stack is next to useless.
I'm running VMs ontop of my Windows 7 install for all development work. Anything that's Windows based is either a 10 or 2016.
I guess I should have noted that I do all my C# dev work in Windows 7 and run Arch VMs for everything else. My Windows 10 setup won’t be much different, but I just don’t trust Windows 10 and won’t be running my VMs on it.
I haven’t followed up on whether this “feature” made it into an actual Windows 10 update, but I remember reading about keylogging to the cloud as a way to pre-load your start menu with things that might be relevant to what you’re doing. Maybe it’s just being a developer and knowing what this kind of casual abstraction can cause, but I’m not okay with the philosophy that gets it into a test release of Windows 10. Microsoft is doing cool stuff these days but they still haven’t won me over.
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Sounds pretty common!
About Qubes: I was just playing with it a couple of weeks ago. It's interesting, and I'd consider using it except for one thing. When you're running a browser, the cursor doesn't change when hovering over a link. I know it sounds nitpicky, but I kind of want/need that. I did some digging around and didn't get any solution. Are you OK with that, or did you find a workaround?
I used Qubes for a few years and don’t remember running into that, but I’ve used Vim keybinding extensions in the browser for a while and may not have noticed. It’s that way in all browsers for you?
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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.