alt Hacker NewsIts been a very long time since I was a Sysadmin, but I'm curious what managing a fleet of Linux desktops is like today? Has it vastly improved?
When I last tried in a small pilot program, it was incredibly primitive. Linux desktops were janky and manual compared to Active Directory and group policy, and an alternative to Intune/AAD didn't even seem to exist. Heck, even things like WSUS and WDS didnt seem to have an open version or only had versions that required expensive expert level SME'S to perform constant fiddling. Meanwhile the Windows tools could be managed by 20 year old admins with basic certitifcations.
Also, GRC and security seemed to be impossible back then. There was an utter lack of decent DLP tools, proper legal hold was difficult, EDR/AV solutions were primitive and the options were limited, etc.
Back then it was like nobody who had ever actually been a sysadmin had ever taken an honest crack at Linux and all the hype was coming from home users who had no idea what herding boxen was actually like.
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I think this comes primarily from trying to add a separate management tool on top, instead of leveraging the OS structure themself. There is a reason, why most directories are specified to be readonly. Also writable XOR persistent is mostly true. The only things required to be writable are /tmp, /var and /home. /tmp is wiped at least on every boot or is even just a ramdisk. /var can be cached or reset to the predefined settings on boot. /home needs to be managed, that is true. But you wouldn't want every users directory on every host anyway, instead you want to populate them on login. That is typically done by libpam.
/usr is expected to be shared among hosts, host-specific stuff goes into /usr/local for a reason, and as a sysadmin you can decide to simply not have host specific software.
EDR/AV is basically unnecessary, when you only mount things either writable or executable. And you don't want the users to start random software or mount random USB-sticks anyway.
> Back then it was like nobody who had ever actually been a sysadmin had ever taken an honest crack at Linux and all the hype was coming from home users who had no idea what herding boxen was actually like.
Unix has over 50 years of history of being primarily managed by sysadmins instead of home users. While Linux is not Unix, it has inherited a lot. The whole system is basically designed to run a bunch of admin configured software and is actually less suitable for home users. I would say the primary problem was accessing it with a Windows mindset.
AFAIK they use Open-Xchange, Univention Corporate Server and other specialized (maybe customized?) an open solutions for telephony, interoperability and other tasks.
https://euro-stack.com/blog/2025/3/schleswig-holstein-open-s...
I would disagree with you both about the past and the present and what's "janky", but - that's actually beside the point:
LibreOffice works just fine on _Windows_ - and that's what the majority of its users are running.
So, Schleswig-Holstein can switch to Linux, or not switch, or let specific agencies or individuals choose.
I really don’t get why there’s always this group of people who feel the need to constantly manage everything for others—like sysadmins, for example. Sure, there are valid scenarios where management makes sense, like printing or shared drives, but most of the stuff is just over the top. As a developer, I’m sick of all the constant restrictions—broken VPNs, stealth monitoring, and antivirus software that slows everything down. These "security measures" are supposed to help, but they just kill performance and cause frustration. At the end of the day, I just want my system to work smoothly without constant interference.
This is my concern with all those "success" stories about Linux as an enterprise desktop OS. Run it for 10 years and show me the actual cost savings/improved productivity.
Microsoft is trash and is getting worse day by day, but at the very least it's the same trash everyone has to deal with, so people mostly got used to the smell, and you can get economies of scale in tools used to deal with said smell. MS is trash because of incompetence.
Linux is dozens of different flavors of trash, so you don't even get economies of scale dealing with it. It's trash because of ideology - the people involved would often reject the functionality you mentioned for ideological reasons, and even for those who do accept them, won't agree on the implementation meaning you now have a dozen of different flavors, and will take up arms if someone tries to unify things (just look at the reaction to systemd).
Linux works well for careers where shoveling trash is already part of your work, in which case all the effort doubles as training for the job and experience makes this a non-issue. But for non-IT careers where the computer is just a tool that is expected to work properly, it's nowhere near there, and will never get there because everyone's instead arguing on the definition of "there" and which mode of transportation to use getting there.