Comment by BuckRogers
6 years ago
You either pay with licensing or hire a team to support. There’s no free as in beer, anywhere. At least once you get beyond some guy’s single Linux Mint install on his personal laptop, but not at any complex scale. Active Directory, development support, these things are needed. Hiring and maintaining a competent team is most often more expensive and importantly, far more difficult to competently do than licensing. Microsoft has a complete, vertically aligned stack that they’ve spent decades building and refining, there’s a lot of value there. Ubuntu is setup to compete here, and they’re a fine choice, but you do lose some things over going with Microsoft.
The wish upon a star for free beer is strong.
99% of the desktops in my office are ubuntu. A few are centos or windows. Laptops usually come with windows so we don't remove it. Some are mac. Shared resources like email, shared storage,vpn, wifi and cluster access auth via ldap. Most of the windows desktops belong to the admin group. We host our own...everything..from dns to room booking. Most of it run on lxc on proxmox. The most painful things to do here..one of them is definitely licensing.
Linuxes are easy. All you need is ssh access. Ansible can do everything afterwards. Much easier to troubleshoot. Windows are hard. Very hard to troubleshoot. And so many ports open but still hard to remotely manage.
Like adding printers. A line in /etc/cups/client.conf will suffice for all the linux machines. I can even add that via ansible. Windows requires installing drivers n clicking things in the gui for each printer. Its like 100 times more effort to do the same chores...
We spend mostly on hardware. Switches. Servers. Desktops. Gpus. Hard disks. Laptops.
Support? I urge you to try run your IT on Microsoft, with a support contract. Their phone support was useless, is useless, and will be useless.
I worked in BestBuy once, their IT gave up on fixing Windows and defaulted to re-imagining disks upon first issues with Win/Office despite having a support contract.
That's not the sort of support that I'm talking about. That's trivial, and those Best Buy employees are most likely just incompetent, kids off the street that enjoy computers. It's true you might get better desktop support out of a Redhat engineer (for Windows, desktop Linux, or otherwise), if you could afford to pay him. The same would apply if people had a direct line to a Microsoft engineer.
I'm talking about ensuring some script you wrote in VB6 in 1998 still works on machines in 2019. Take that scenario times 100. It's not advertised but they do fix (or break, then fix) enterprise issues better than any entity I've seen, and definitely at that scale.
BB's policy makes sense as it's the most cost effective solution.
Desktop much?
In this century, cloud apps as a managed service are sufficient for some 90 pct of office workers. Chromebook/thin clients can be wiped on the hour or chucked in the trash if they break. So, 365, which is killing it. Not an MS cheerleader but this is the right play for them.
Developers are obviously different and need a curated desktop experience.
In this century, cloud apps as a managed service are sufficient for some 90 pct of office workers.
Is there data on this?
So, so, so, so many companies have random internal desktop apps, or are dependent on external ones, that I think chucking a Chromebook at 90% of office workers is a pipe dream.
But absent data, this is all pure speculation.
Thin-clients are very much last century, mid-last century at that. They were called terminals. That's just a new buzzword because technology became fashionable for the non-technical, like calling server farms, "the cloud".
A thin-client is just a desktop that can't do much of anything under its own power. There's good reason Apple keeps advancing their A-series chips, why not stop at "thin client" (running a browser), like a Chromebook? Instead, they're near desktop Intel speeds. To answer that, it's because they want their platform to actually be able to do something on its own. AR, VR, image processing, video editing, you name it. No developer is required to own it, unlike this idea that "curated desktops", which can be around the power of an Apple A13, as somehow just aimed at developers.
Agreed on O365. Microsoft can do thin clients, and has a complete stack that integrates easily to resolve more complex demands out of the box. Just because it's the 21st century doesn't mean any of these concepts listed are new, nor is what Microsoft built in the 80's, 90's and 00's valueless. Depending on requirements it's very strongly to the contrary.
If your employee’s tasks are more typically clerical ones like data entry, working with MS Word documents, etc., then why do you want computing power capable of “AR, VR, image processing, video editing”? That sounds like something that the employee would be applying towards rich social media experiences instead, which is probably something you don’t want them doing on company time.
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