this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I get it for personal or even business use on a small scale is great. I use Linux daily, I'm a sysadmin and manage windows and Linux servers. My main desktop is windows. I'm considering switching my home pc over to Linux again since generally (from what I hear) gaming works mostly and that was what used to always bring me back to windows. Now I don't really game that much anymore anyway so it may not even really matter that much for me.
But for a business that has hundreds or thousands of user devices that they need to secure, configure, meet compliance, etc, how would they do that with a Linux distribution? Microsoft has active directory and group policy to manage this kind of thing (and now moving toward AAD and intune to manage device configuration) but I have yet to see any kind of Linux desktop distribution that has a central configuration management, patch management and security management. Sure you can configure it to auto update and send it out hoping for the best, but what happens when a device stops checking in, or the VPN client breaks, or there is some software we need to push out to all our users immediately? What choice do we have?
Yes, it's possible to deploy Linux in enterprise. Google even develops ChromeOS for that purpose, deploys Chromebooks in-house, and sells Chromebooks. Heck, you can enroll your Linux boxes into Active Directory with SSSD if you want to. You can use pull-based configuration management tools to configure workstations. Albeit rare, there're MDM solutions similar to Windows ones with Linux support, such as Kolide and Scalefusion. I agree that the Windows sysadmin experience is seamless if you fit into Microsoft's model, compared to Linux. Linux sysadmins must know how to write scripts to bridge the gap. Although I suspect the Microsoft experience will get worse as Microsoft deprecates older solutions in favor of Azure.