Hello everyone, my company (our department is of around 150+ developers/machine learning people/researchers) is currently considering switching from Windows to Gnu+Linux for company devices (as in the machines we use in our daily work) and we are currently in the phase of collecting requirements. I’m not in charge of the process or involved in the decision phase, but as an enthusiast I’m curious about it. We handle data and other sensitive resources, so the environment should remain managed by the IT department (what’s possible to install, VPNs, firewalls, updates and similar). What do companies generally use in this kind of scenario? I’m assuming they generally do some stuff with either Canonical or Red Hat, but are there alternatives? Are there ways to do something that works across distributions by using flatpak or the nix package manager? What are your experiences?
In terms of ease of management and deployment NixOS might be an interesting option. It can be completely configured through a single file so the deployment and update processes become very straightforward and easy to manage in a centralised fashion.
I was thinking about that myself, but is there a way to remotely update configuration.nix and rebuild, if the requirements change? For example, if some dev wants to use Geany instead of Vscode and Admin is like “Yeah, why not”, how would that be implemented?
I would consider a git repo of a few standard configurations and switch them to a config that had it, or possibly maintain individual configs per user. Your orchestration would need to reference the git repo so when you need to add software XYZ to everyone’s machine you don’t have to re-run all of the individual playbooks and deal with the hassle of remembering who needed which playbook ran.
We’re running Linux on the vast majority of PCs at my job. We used to run Lubuntu, but switched to Debian. You can use pam_mount so user folders are mounted from a server at login, to create a “roaming profiles” environment. But there really isn’t a great solution for laptop users that might be away from the office.
If you do use pam_mount, don’t mount their entire home folder. That will end up throwing a bunch of stuff on the server, like chrome temporary internet files, and their .config folder, that just aren’t needed on the server and will slow everything down. Just mount their individual Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Videos, Desktop, etc. folders.
We’re a small business, we don’t have any Enterprise Support or anything like that.
Have you considered git for the roaming profile files/settings?
