How many here are running Linux as their actual work machine versus keeping it as a home or hobby setup? The experience can be so different depending.
If you’re using it at work, did you have to fight IT for it? Are you self-employed and just made the call yourself? Or does your workplace actually support it?
And if it’s home only, what’s stopping you from using it at work? Is it specific software, company policy, or just not worth the hassle?
@ work Linux servers are OK. As to Linux desktop @ workplace I had not to fight IT because I belonged to IT. I fought with IS & ‘suits’ to deviate from ‘corporate’ standard. And I always had ‘corporate’ Windows installed within VirtualBox VM
At my office I am the IT Manager, therefore I am able to make Linux my daily driver both at home and at work.
For my home computer I experiment and distro hop. I even had a vanilla Arch installation one time.
For my work laptop, because of security concerns, I stick with a known popular distro. So I first started with Manjaro i3wm, and then moved to Fedora Sway. I also have a couple of VMs on my work proxmox server, Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation.
Interestingly, when there is a security concern for files, other IT staff would come to me because I have a Linux box.
And like @ugnvs I have Windows in a VM to access Windows only resources.
At home: I daily drive Linux - mainly “Ubuntu MATE 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat)” - although in a “dual boot” setup with “Windows 11” for a few specific cases where I need to use Windows.
At work: I daily drive “Windows 11” (Work provided “corporate” laptop computer)
I use Zorin on my gaming PC, my wife’s gaming laptop, and the media PC hooked up to the 55" TV. I use Debian or Ubuntu on every “server” (basically anything I run headless in the rack).
The only Windows device on my network, unfortunately, is my work laptop. The company I work for does not allow us the choice to switch operating systems. At a past company, when I worked in DevOps, I was able to choose my OS and ran Pop!_OS for ~2 years and loved it.
I would instantly switch off of Windows at work if the choice were up to me!
Since I’m retired, “work” and “home” are the same thing, so Linux is my daily driver; the only thing I run on computers besides Linux distros is Chrome OS, which also uses a Linux kernel and Android phones, same story; so Linux kernels are the engines behind all of my systems.
Would love to install some easy and stable distro on every computer at work, it’s an FM radio station, but people would get mad and make my life a living hell so it’s Windows only there. For now!
Retired now but as a power plant operator I used pneumatic controls first and after automating we had ‘Westation’ which used Unix. Emerson controls bought it and switched it to Windows, fortunately I never had to use that.
So Linux at home and Unix at work.
Retired! (Booo! Yea! Booo! Yea! … can’t make up my mind!)
Only use on tower computer which was home-built by my brother 16 years ago. So everything is “experimental” and an “exploratory” experience at first attempt! Luckily, no drop-dead issues so far!
My workplace describe themselves as a “start-up”, but they’re relaxed on technologies - programming language, frameworks, tools, operating system, it’s whatever does the job.
My CTO jokes a lot “I’m switching to Linux!” when Windows does Windows stuff to him. Our team do use Linux servers for machine learning. I use Arch + KDE at home and work.
Since they use Microsoft 365, I just wish I had native apps like Office, Teams, etc… but I make do in a dedicated web browser (“Firefox Development Edition”) and change the icon/program name so they don’t get lost as Firefox all day long.
Frankly, the IT-desk on my work supplied me with a Windows 11 laptop (12th gen i5) which I only use for that horrible archaic bulky and slow piece of excrement that is called “office365”. (really, after working more than 10 minutes on that sofware I unavoidibly have the urge to throw it out of the window due to sheer frustration)
I do the vast majority of my work on my Acer swift one laptop running Ubuntu MATE 24.04LTS.
Although this laptop is much less powerful (Intel N6000), it runs circles around that company issued Windows 11 thing. I would not be able to do my work without it, at least not as easy and convenient.
The reason I don’t use office and teams on my Acer it is because office365 and especially teams is unwieldly and even more frustrating in a browser, regardless OS or hardware and I want to keep my laptop MS-crapware-free.
There seems to be something fundamentally wrong at Microsoft. With Copilot, they had such a head start and it’s so so bad. It gets in the way. Even recently they added copilot more invasively to GitHub and for the life of me I’m still struggling to figure out how to properly opt out.
It is for this reason that I’m working on moving off of GitHub for all of my personal repos. After some review, I have landed on Codeberg. Of all the services I like to self-host, this is one I’m ok not self-hosting (for now).
After the inline advertisement on a PR, difficulties with opting-out of what I don’t like, and the default “opt-out” policy to begin with (it should be default opt-in), I decided I was done with GitHub. Hopefully Codeberg does not move in the same direction or I will just self-host.
I’ve been using Linux at home since 1993. Most of that time I’ve been using it at work as well, despite the sighs and frowns from management, and having to deal with the “We don’t support Linux” from the service desk (Hey that’s alright, I’d never ask the likes of you for help with Linux, so I’m good").
The one exception was IBM. When you start at IBM you get a choice: do you want to use pee cee, mac or Linux? and all 3 are supported and have the same apps for messaging, vpn, office documents etc.
I’m currently working for the state. They were all all windows shop, and I got hired for the job with them, to migrate the state retirement system from mainframe to cloud-based Linux. It’s been a good gig, but unfortunately they are totally windows based, and for the first time in decades, I’m having to use a windows laptop, issued and managed by the state. I don’t really do anything of interest on it, just the obligatory email and teams chat. The real work is done via mobaxterm, which gives me several tabs to get to the remote Linux machines where all the real work is done.
Oh, and “I use Debian BTW” (Debian, Proxmox, MX Linux)