$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.

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.

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