I was thinking about this the other day. Windows 11 is starting to roll out on company laptops and I would love it if we had the choice to install Linux. But I think there are some challenges to that.

Most large companies control what employees are allowed to install on their machines for security reasons. We wouldn't want any spyware or ransomware or any kind of malware getting installed inadvertently. Most places will use software allow lists through applications like the Software Center and use software detection programs to monitor if any non compliant software is installed.

There's also permission management through group policies on Windows to manage which kind of user can do what on their system.

Finally, I hate to say it, but most companies use the whole Microsoft Office 365 eco system with Microsoft One Drive and SharePoint. I know we can use the web version for some of the apps, but for practicality's sake, it's best to have an installed version. And the cloud sync feature of One Drive is also very important for automatically backing up important work. I doubt they would let that go.

I would love to hear if anyone can offer solutions to these problems.

$previous_job allowed us to pick. One of my coworkers had to replace his laptop, and I convinced him to try out Linux this time. I handed him the bootstrap script and he was back to working by the afternoon.

Our CEO got wind of this and said as a matter of policy everyone is switching to Linux unless they have a good reason (needing excel for financial reports is a good reason). The two new hires who had been setting up their dev environment for over a week at that point were the trigger for this.

90% of my work is done in WSL anyways... I would much rather have KDE as my DE than Windows 11. Please Microsoft, if you love Linux so much now, port Office to it, and maybe my employer would be ok with it.

we not only allow it, we enforce it. windows not allowed in my company

We don't even have Firefox at work.

Only options are Edge and Chrome.

I don't have windows allowed on my job, thanks god

It's simple, cost. Supporting multiple DE's is expensive. And provides little or no benefit to the company.

It may work at a small company with tech savvy users (like the ones commenting here). But ultimately at a normal large business, is nothing but a hassle that at best makes a few employees happy.

I'm glad that I've never had to rely on windows at work. It's been linux all the way even when it still had a lot of rough edges.

It was still way ahead of WfW or 95 though.

Our software is officially supported on Windows and Linux. For some reason our chief product uses a Mac, so we support that unofficially. It can be quite a hassle to keep our code compatible on those platforms and Build Bot often gets angry when I open a pull request, but boy is it nice to be able to use whatever OS I like for development!

My current employer is a first for me:

• engineering essentially have to use Macs. Windows is accepted but not supported
• all products are built and hosted on Linux, both cloud and on-prem

I work with data management / data brokering at a university. I am not allowed to have a Linux machine. I have to use a virtual environment.

My employer allows Linux - only a customized version of Fedora that's preconfigured to handle our environment, including certificates (802.1x, browser client certs, etc) with automated renewal, endpoint management software, deployment of settings using Chef, etc.

We have a few internal apps built using React Native though, which is only available on Windows and MacOS. There's been some Github repos trying to port React Native to Linux but nothing that's production-quality yet.

It's funny working at a company that doesn't allow Linux on a workstation, but is also actively developing and deploying tons of Linux-based products...

I think the real reason is that their MDM cant lock down a Linux machine the way it locks down a Windows or Mac machine...

The company i work with allow any OS to be installed. With a caveat, because we are heavily invested in the Windows eco system using office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics Nav and sql server, Ms AD. With that said, if you use that software for more than 50% of your work time we recommend Windows. But otherwise it is still the employees choice and if you are completely comfortable running windows in a VM, go for it. IT won't give you endless support if you have too many issues with your VM. If we loose to much time and you are not proficient enough in macOS or Linux then we just give you a windows machine.

I've had Linux 3 jobs in a row so I've been lucky that way, it usually helps to match production so that's a good argument for it.

My solution is to host a virtual machine with my dev workstation, and use Windows or Mac for business admin stuff like email, slack, etc.

I’m still surprised people still use the term sysadmin.