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Comment by sneak

2 days ago

I’m really curious to see what the answer for MDM and Group Policy is on Linux. The SSO part is mostly figured out, but the reason places use Windows is often manageability.

Is there anyone doing MDM or policy enforcement on Linux other than Google Workspace + chromebooks?

13 comments

sneak

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ndriscoll  2 days ago

It's Nix so you just push the new generation to the device. It's probably the easiest possible way to do device management. It's also generally like two lines of extra config to wrap a block into a container if you want to hide some of the underlying OS tools completely, which I've never tried with a full desktop environment but I'd assume should basically just work if you pass a couple things like GPU?

  • Muromec  2 days ago

    The hard part is finding enough people working for the public sector salary who know those two extra lines and where to put them, and then making sure they are not getting bored or disillusioned enough.

    • ndriscoll  2 days ago

      You don't need someone who knows those two lines anymore. You can just ask codex to make it so that users can't do whatever. It's highly competent at just reading the nixpkgs source, or it knows how Linux works and can write its own modules.

      Nix happens to also set you up with a working build environment so if a program doesn't expose the necessary options to manage it the way you want, I bet Codex would have no trouble patching it as part of your nix config.

      6 replies →

  • sneak  15 hours ago

    I’m not talking about software install/updates, that is easy and straightforward on every major enterprise distro. I’m talking about Group Policy specifically, that is, the ability to enforce many settings across the whole OS/DE.

    Minimum password lengths, maximum screen saver delay, screen saver password requirement, disk crypto enforcement, a million other little things. All of them can be done by customizing linux sure but organizations won’t want to maintain a separate distro for each business unit that needs different policies.

    • ndriscoll  10 hours ago

      Nix does more than software install/updates. It also manages system wide config (e.g. files in /etc, systemd units, timers/cron jobs, firewall, etc.) or even user preferences with home-manager. You can also organize your config into modules to have e.g. a base for everyone + special settings for different BUs that need it. And it does all this declaratively with the ability to rollback to previous working config if needed since it can handle multiple versions of packages all being present until you choose to garbage collect old generations of the system config (which you can also set to automate, of course).

      It's basically what people think they want from Docker but don't actually get from Docker.