Linux

luckily i can wipe my work laptop and install linux (for now, there are discussions about not letting unmanaged devices on the network at some point...), but what annoys me is seeing how much tax money we send straight to microsoft. i work in the education sector in europe and the majority of the company's funds comes from the government, to send millions of that straight to the US, especially with the politics going on right now, seems like a horrible idea. and SO many others are doing the same thing, i swear if we invested just 10% of it into FOSS the world would be a better place already and we'd all save money.

I’m no Windows fanboy but I have to use it quite a lot, at home and at work. I don’t know what versions or settings you guys have set up but I’ve never had a Windows update I can’t postpone, ever.

Then come up with a better alternative to office 365.

Windows isn't keeping Microsoft around. Its their office software. (and azure)

My company has multiple options for computers. You can choose the windows laptop. The bigger windows laptop. The other windows laptop. Or if you are a graphic designer, that one MacBook option.

I've been pretty lucky that I've been able to use Linux on my work laptop the past 3 jobs in a row. It really helps that we use Linux production in and when I tell them that I haven't used Windows in nearly a decade, they're usually willing to let me work with Linux.

Go get drunk. You deserve it.

I agree.

I find the Teams app works great on Ubuntu. The Microsoft apps work OK in browser, until you have a lot of collaborators.

I rarely need to switch to windows, so when I do switch I expect to spend an hour doing updates.

I also use Windows at work, and it is driving me insane. The updates can be annoying, but it is mostly just how fucking slow it is. Directories routinely take mulitple seconds to load, and I don't understand why. I also just prefer Gnome in general, but I do think the Window's user interface as a whole is pretty good when it works. I will say, WSL works well for the things I want to run "in linux", and it integrates very nicely with VS Code.

I can actually install Linux if I want. They provide instructions for how to roll it in to Intune etc, and I will probably try it, but keep a dual boot to Windows available for when I really need it. The problem is that my job is married to Office, which doesn't have native linux support at all. We ues OneDrive, Outlook, Teams and collaborative Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Most of these probably run okay enough in browser, but especially for big Word documents where we need to make sure formatting is okay (a nightmare in Word even without multiple users editing the document at once), I am not sure if it works well enough. Rclone can be used to sync to OneDrive. For now I just try to avoid making office documents whenever possible, sticking to markdown, latex and csv files etc., store as much as possible on our i.e. our GitLab instance instead, and hopefully it will it will be easier to switch over time.

I also wonder what would happen if Donny wakes up one day, decides he wants to invade Europe or something and all our Office 365 licenses suddenly stop working. We would have a lot of other bigger issues of course, so it's not the most critical issue.

Come work at Meta, we have Fedora Linux laptops :)

Edit: Maybe we should crowd source a list of companies that let you use Linux. I've worked at startups and straight up told the CEO "I'm installing Linux" and that has worked, but corporate companies you can't get away with that

"Tell me it's Friday without saying it's Friday" ;)

But to the point, yeah, my current job tried to convince me to switch to Windows. I tried, it was miserable experience, it broke in 3 days and all that was even before the current Windows ludicrousness

@ranovich if you just need to hop on a call and windows is giving you shit, why not join using another device?

The update thing started maybe 10 years ago or was it 15. Company I worked for went from terrible patching to this BS. Why something in between was not sufficient I will never know or why it cannot hot patch.

Edit: Before the company actually did serious patching worms regularly took down the whole company for days. But why they had to go from that to interrupting presentations and calls is beyond me.

At work we have everything windows. When getting my work laptop with windows, I just intalled PopOs on it. I do have the problem of not able to use AOVPN, so I can't work from home. But since I need to go close to work, why even work from home.