I’m liking the recent posts about switching to Linux. Some of my home machines run Linux, and I ran it on my main laptop for years (currently on Win10, preparing to return to Linux again).

That’s all fine and dandy but at work I am forced to use Windows, Office, Teams, and all that. Not just because of corpo policies but also because of the apps we need to use.

Even if it weren’t for those applications, or those policies, or if Wine was a serious option, I would still need to work with hundreds of other people in a Windows world, live-sharing Excel and so on.

I’m guessing that most people here just accept it. We use what we want at home, and use what the bossman wants at work. Or we’re lucky to work in a shop that allows Linux. Right?

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    0·
    9 months ago

    I’ve used Linux Desktop both personal and at work since 2003, I guess I got lucky with where I worked, they always allowed it as long as I could do everything that needed to be done.

    Then again, I was either the owner or CTO level for the last decade or so, and just made those decisions myself.

    Now I’m trying to push my current company to switch completely to Linux, and it ain’t easy. Not because of Linux, that part is fine and whatever easy, but because Microsoft worked hard to ensure you can’t escape their fucking clutches.

    Moving away from teams, for example, will be a tough one, because most of our customers and government have complety relented to Microsoft, and you MUST use teams to talk to them.

    So then what? Use different messengers internally and externally? I’m still not sure how to get rid of that part, but for the rest, we are going off the microshit soon

      • Pumasuedeblue@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        9 months ago

        This is true, but it’s one of the ways MS weasels it’s way in. If you’re using teams with clients, then they likely have Outlook as their scheduling app, so you have to use it too, since it only works with itself. It’s a backdoor to get you into their trap and get more and more of your data tied up and expensive to migrate.

        • toynbee@lemmy.world
          0·
          9 months ago

          Huh, I’ve never encountered this obstacle. On the rare occasion I’ve had to use Outlook, I’ve just used OWA.

          I’m sorry for the challenges you’re facing.

  • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
    0·
    9 months ago

    Full Linux shop here. Love it…

    Desktops, laptops, servers.

    For those rare customer teams meets, we just do it in the browser.

    </saltRub>

    • EntropyPure@lemmy.world
      0·
      9 months ago

      How big is your install base at work? Still wondering how to replace something like Active Directory, Group Policies and the like for centralized management akin to Windows based networks.

      • PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        FreeIPA does a passable job at replacing AD for the absolute most basic functions. I used to use it for sudo rules and user management at one of my previous jobs, even though it wasn’t a Linux shop.

      • jollyrogue@lemmy.ml
        0·
        9 months ago

        FreeIPA covers most scenarios. Kerberos, Dynamic DNS/DNS, LDAP.

        GPO equivalency would need some config management tool. Ansible is what RH would suggest, but something with an agent would probably be better.

    • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      I use an unofficial teams appimage all day every day.

      I think its probably an electron thing.

      I hate having to use it but it works fine.

  • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
    0·
    9 months ago

    Office 365 and teams work fine on Linux in Chrome or Firefox, including voice calls, video calls and screen sharing.

    Excel, in particular, is 100% inside Office365 in the browser when I have to interact with it. In the past, I have created Excel files in LibreOfffice and uploaded them to Office365 to convert. Though I haven’t been tempted to do so in a few years.

    Most of my coworkers are not aware that I run Linux at work.

      • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
        0·
        9 months ago

        Fair enough!

        Conversion

        First, I haven’t yet encountered a pre-existing document on Linux that didn’t turn into a nice PDF when fed into “Print - Save as PDF”, which I have found to be present by default on Gnome and KDE (the two most popular desktop environments). So for the majority of distros, Print to PDF is pre-installed and available.

        For advanced use cases, there’s Pandoc. Pandoc can convert most document formats to many other formats, and gives fine grained control over every step.

        Authoring PDFs

        For authoring a quick PDF, there’s LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

        And of course there’s GnuImp, Krita, and so many more options for editing some images to add in.

        Most distros ship with LibreOfffice or OpenOffice, and at least one image editor.

        But I do recommend investigating some free and open image editors. There’s many use cases and twice as many options. If the default isn’t for you, what you need may be one (free) Software search away.

        But can I just use plain text? (Yes)

        For control freaks like me, there’s also a whole ecosystem of tools that work well with Markdown, ASCIIDoc, LaTex, and ReStructuredText.

        For the curious, start by trying VSCodium with a Markdown extension.

        You can tune your extensions here, but I think I recall “Markdown All-In-One” getting me all the way from raw text to nice enough looking PDFs in one command. Maybe it was two, using the built in “Print to PDF” dialog.

        Once again, PanDoc is the powerhouse of this use case, and many excellent tools are available.

  • cog@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    9 months ago

    I’m not forced to, but occasionally my job kinda requires it so I dualboot (most of my coworkers who are on linux run a windows virtual machine when they need it).

    But my previous job required windows due to all the industry specific software only working on windows. No chance of getting that to work on linux sadly. Then I just used windows at work. It’s always my employer’s hardware anyway and I like to keep work and free-time separate so it was ok.

  • Soapbox@lemmy.zip
    0·
    9 months ago

    My computer at work runs windows. But I bought a cheap KVM switch and use my Linux laptop for all my personal web browsing and slacking off.

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    9 months ago

    Yes, I’m forced to use Windows at work and that’s part of why I only use Linux in my personal life.

    Window is so stupid and annoying. It needs to reboot like twice a day for updates. Not to mention individual apps that need to update in the middle of usage. Also the news/spam and stuff. It’s garbage. I’m the guy who’s constantly telling everybody that we should switch to Linux.

    (Also, even though my work laptop is Windows, I do most of my real work connected to a Linux server/IDE.)

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      even though my work laptop is Windows, I do most of my real work connected to a Linux server/IDE.

      This has been me for my entire pro career. There we are, working to maintain at&t Unix, but it’s all (then) vandyke, winamp, Mozilla4. Here I am now, at work, corp win11, putty, radiogarden, fucking outlook/teams and all its dreck.

      But look at bazzite and Nobara: if we can avoid the snaps/appimages/flatpaks in addition to the venvs and npm and other toxic cult cargo sploit vectors, we have a strong platform with still just enough windows access for fucking teams and the rest of the redmond-based data sovereignty threats.

  • Griffus@lemmy.zip
    0·
    9 months ago

    When in the office, yes. But I use my desktop when working from home. The annoying part I have spent like two minutes trying to solve by installing Vivaldi, is Teams, 'cause now my picture is squashed for some reason on calls, while working perfectly in OBS and elsewhere.

  • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    I’m lucky that I work from home (have done since before the pandemic) and pretty much all my work is done in a browser, and my bosses don’t care what I use as long as the work gets done. So I just work on Fedora on my regular desktop.

  • practisevoodoo@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 months ago

    I was managing with virtual box on the work machine. But following win 11 the performance under hyper v is so appalling that I gave up.
    In the end my solution is a 2nd hand ThinkPad off FB marketplace that I use for work.
    Browser apps cover all the word/excel/outlook/teams requirements.
    Winboat is covering the very limited set of other apps.
    Everything else I do works better in Linux, or at least better on a device I have admin for.
    Yes I am out of pocket but not significantly, and not having to deal with windows has been completely worth it for me.

  • demonsword@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 months ago

    I count myself as one of the lucky ones that isn’t forced to use Windows by the company I work for. We even have our internal (ubuntu-based) distro, and despite being passable proficient with Linux, I can count on having support if I ever need it.

    That’s all fine and dandy but at work I am forced to use Windows, Office, Teams, and all that.

    Yeah, me too. But all of those (except Windows of course) can be used on the browser

  • Chaser@lemmy.zip
    0·
    9 months ago

    At my work they use Mac OS. However before I started the job I said, that it’s a requirement for me to work with Linux. So I’m the only one with a proper OS in the company now 🥴

    But jokes aside, it’s not that bad to work on different OSes. Nowadays everything runs in a Docker container. Ok, it’s a bit slow for the Apple users, but that’s not my problem 🤷‍♂️

  • djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Yup, and every time I have to deal with Windows bullshit at work, I get a little bit happier that I don’t have to deal with it when I go home.

  • fluxx@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 months ago

    In the past I mostly got to persuade them to allow me to use Linux. In one, however, they got me a macbook, so I resorted to living in the VM most of the time. I had to use xcode for some of the Mac development, but for the rest, I was masochistic enough to be able to withstand living in a VM. Though that mac was Intel based, now ARM ones would likely not perform as good to justify it. Asahi doesn’t work on newer ARM Macs AFAIK.

  • Frank Exchange of Views@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Linux admin grey(ish) beard here, work provides a MacBook and I just use it as a web browser and terminal.

    Internal chat, mail, etc are all browser based, Google Docs is the office suite of choice for anyone I have to work with.

    I get a decent terminal (iterm2), together with ZSH, tmux and Python is all I really need. We do have a bunch of GNU core utils installed as well, although coming from a UNIX background, I don’t mind the BSD versions that ship on MacOS either.

    Would I prefer Linux? Yes, I would. But at the same time, the M4 performance is awesome, the touchpad is glorious and I don’t have to foot the bill, so I’m not complaining!