Companies that use desktop Linux
Companies that use desktop Linux
Basically title. Do you know of any companies that use desktop Linux?
I can think of two in my area in Brisbane - Adfinis and Red Hat. Both have a pretty small presence here from what I last heard (several employees each).
My employer allows the Linux team to use Linux but it's discouraged and our lives are made somewhat difficult.
A Turkish tech chain uses base Ubuntu, that is all I saw
Worked in R&D of a robotics startup (<50 people in total). The software and electronics teams used linux, the mechanical team used windows to run solidworks. Rest of the organization ran windows, not even domain joined windows, just windows 7 pro or something.
I have a hard time coming up with entire companies, where Linux is the default OS and deviating requires a good reason.
The vast majority of devs at my company uses desktop Linux (Ubuntu LTS). Though admittedly our IT department would prefer if we all used Windows.
My company used to allow it, but then it became clear people were doing too many dumb things with their work computers to control them normally. For example, some people would explicitly turn their PCs off without updating the OS every Friday and were nearly a year out of date.
That, plus other security concerns I don't remember surrounding the tightening of our policies for security certifications required to net a very demanding client, made it so that we needed to institute mobile device management (MDM) for everything.
We went with Microsoft's version because there were some crucial things I forgot that only it could do. But it didn't support Linux.
So our few people using Linux had to choose between Windows and Mac OS.
I know some in Indonesia. SALT.id(https://salt.id) use either Ubuntu or Fedora OOTB for their engineer, some use mac but most of the times their pick Ubuntu. Small percentage use fedora
They operate in 4 countries, Singapore, Malay, Indonesia, and Australia
When I was at Driver's Village, a fairly large dealership in central New York, I noticed the salesman was using a computer with wallpaper that said Windows 11. This was before Windows 11 was even released. It was very obviously a Gnome desktop. I'm guessing IT just put the windows 11 background on it so the people using it wouldn't complain that they didn't know how to use Linux.
Yeah anyone with that info is not gonna actually name the companies in question lol.
But i know four in Melbourne. And i can tell you that most serious server infrastructure is nix. Especially in ISPs, RADIUS babyyyy
I've noticed that some "mobility" startups are using Linux. E.g. companies working on electric or automated vehicles.
google and nvidia both do.
i don't know if it's still true; but they gave their employees 2 computers where their workstations were usually linux and their laptops were either linux or mac if they were engineers. it was their choice to decide what to get; but they usually went along with whatever their peers where using; except for non-engineers who always wanted macs no matter what, even if their windows machines were newer and better by miles.
Up until several years ago our proprietary CAD CAM FEA software had GUI desktop linux support on SUSE or RHEL. They recently dropped GUI desktop version and only support nonGUI use going forward (for batch work), and dropped MacOS a few uears before that. I am hoping with thr uptick in Linux numbers they would reconsider at some point
I work for a major network infrastructure company. We can choose from Windows, macOS, or Ubuntu for work laptops. I chose macOS, but I'm probably going to switch to Ubuntu with my next laptop refresh since a lot of our internal tooling works better on Linux.
Sunshine Coast here. We all use Linux desktop. Libre office. Gimp. Krita. Inkscape. Vscodium. Thunderbird. Sublime. Etc etc. We have a programmer who favoured Windows. We finally converted him. Now we only have the mac laptop to deal with having to do osx builds.
Can't say what company, but a large company that provides education tools has been looking into ways to be less dependent on Microsoft. They have some of their employees currently using Linux computers right now. Some employees in the IT department still need a second Windows computer.
In 3 of my last 4 jobs as developer I could use Linux as desktop. The 1 exception did not have the admins that could think ahead of what Amazon or Microsoft has told them. They where also struggling with other 'modern' ideas.
Maybe a German thing, but Linux for a dev is quite common here.
Yes. At one employer, we had an entire domain in our AD forest that was Red Hat / CentOS / Ubuntu workstations for the developers.
I used Linux for work. It was fine until we migrated to O365 from workspace. I've found enough workarounds that no one complains.
Where I work,~2,000 employees and contractors, I'm almost certain I'm the one person using Linux (Fedora) and refusing to use Windows (so they deployed a cloud Windows 365 instance for me to have access to the in-house platform).
I'm blessed to hold a position for which the company would have a really hard time replacing me, I think that's why they haven't booted me (chances are they will at some point, but I don't care anymore).
It still blows my mind how the IT team tries to justify being locked into Microsoft, and then telling me I could potentially become a point of vulnerability, when my system is easily the most secure in the whole company and my habits make for little to no possibility of ever exposing anything outside of the company.
400 staff German state institution, Windows desktops are standard, but you can get a supported and standardized Linux Mint installation provided by IT on your personal computer upon request. A few dozen people do. We also provide some 150 publicly accessible PCs for research in or brach locations, all of which are Mint as well. And IT staff is allowed to install any system on their hardware they want, no questions asked; many run Linuxes. Linuces. Linnixees.
I wish my employer (state government) would use Linux. But unfortunately, they are all in with Microsoft. Everything has gone that way. SharePoint, Microsoft hosted Exchange, OneDrive, etc... And it's as horrible as you can imagine. It's awesome when I can't access my personal files because Microsoft servers are down. And don't get me started on the CrowdStrike fiasco!
Opengear in Brisbane; development teams often use Linux.
Hostpoint, one of the largest hosting companies of Switzerland uses Linux Clients.
My 4 last employers have used desktop Linux to some extent:
- Ericsson (Swedish telecoms), default was to have a Windows laptop with X server (Citrix?) but a few of us were lucky enough to get a Linux laptop.
- Vector (German automotive), Linux dev. environment in a VM on Windows laptops.
- Opera Software (Norwegian web browser), first day I was given a stack of components and told to assemble my PC and then install my Linux distribution of choice.
- And a smaller company, which shall remain unnamed, also used Windows laptops with Linux dev. env. in VM.
Sure most of it was on top of Windows, but if you fullscreen it you can barely tell the difference :)
In my experience, the larger the company, the more likely they are to force you to use Windows. The smaller companies will be more relaxed about the whole thing.
The largest company I've worked for that allows Linux had a staff count of hundreds of engineers and hundreds more non-nerds. In their case though, the laptops were crippled with Crowdstrike and Kollide and while the tech team was working hard to support us, we were always aware that we made up around 1% of the machines they manage and represented a big chunk of their headaches.
The response to this you usually hear (from me even) is that "I don't need support, I know what I'm doing". Which is probably true, but the vast majority of problems is in dealing with access to proprietary systems, failures from Crowdstrike or complaints about kernel versions etc.
TL;DR: work at a small company (<100 staff) and they'll probably leave you alone. Go bigger and you'll be stuck fighting IT in one way or another.
In the US, a lot of Lowes Hardware Stores use Linux on their employee computers. Most movie theater projectors are running CentOS, and most movies that come in on hard drives are formatted to Ext2.
My last 3 employers have let me use Linux on my work laptop, I've gone with Ubuntu each time, it has worked really well for me. I'm lucky that I get to use Linux since I work as a web dev, it often matches production more easily that way.
In my team we use both Linux and Mac (I don’t want to disclose my company, but it’s in Sweden). IT isn’t entirely happy about some of us using Linux because it’s more difficult for them to administer the computers (i.e. install spyware), but so far they’ve been unsuccessful in making us switch.
we can decide ourselfs if we want mac, windows or ubuntu (no other distro allowed). Our code runs in docker containers and except for the IDE our tools are web-based for the most part anyway, so it doesn't really matter which OS you use. though I heard there were quite a few issues with docker and Mac when the first M-chip Macs were used. it's a software company in Germany with ~150 people.
Most people in my company use OSX, followed by a few dozen Linux users (various distros; whatever each one prefers), followed by a few Windows users (whyever they want that). So essentially: we can choose what we want to use.
Journeys (the shoe chain) and Hollister Co. both use Linux distros on their point of sale machines. Hollister's machines are pretty locked down and can basically only run the RPoS software, but a lot of Journeys' software is browser-based, so they have to be a bit more capable.
Pretty sure they're both custom distros, though.
Every company I've ever worked for
I Sysadmin in education here in Brisbane. Half our server stack is Linux on a Nutanix hypervisor. I do all my work from Linux, my junior admin recently moved his workstation to Fedora KDE, I use Kinoite.
The student and staff devices are 95% Windows, manager doesn't care what we use to administer. Officially we're a "Microsoft School"
Many such companies
I work for a very small company. We do embedded development. They gave me a Windows machine. After a few months I ditched Windows for GNU/Linux and after a couple years the other two fellow developers followed suit.
Lowe’s uses a customized Linux distro for their department terminal computers. Most of what you do is in browser or terminal applications, if genesis is still in use.
Retail stores, restaurants, hotels, logistics and shipping companies...tons. You may thinking Gnome or KDE, which you'll probably be more likely to see in dev teams.
I'm a contractor and I use linux if that counts :D
I work for a web host (UK based). We're entirely WFH so as long as you can support it yourself you can use it. They don't care what Distro we use.
Worked for a SaaS company that let you manage your own OS (with some rules in place). Ubuntu was the standard choice, with some Manjaro installs here and there, but there were also people who felt more comfortable on Windows.
Current company has everyone outfitted with Windows laptops with GPO and endpoint monitoring and the like, but then half the company does their work in a Linux VM. Would be funny if it weren't so sad.
My work use it in a limited capacity.
We primarily use Windows but some also use MacOS and some use our internal Linux spin off Ubuntu. With some internal tools and all that.
The Linux users are primarily developers and a few Linux admins and I'm pretty sure the Linux platform is maintained by a developer.
In the company I work with you can use whatever you want but I'm the only one using Linux :(
Some public places like libraries here in Denmark use Linux on their computers, but I don't know to what extent.
Current company's full windows, I use both as does the software I maintain. Retail/POS software.
Previous company used linux for trading. Fintech.
Previous previous used linux solely (well, my team did): Ubuntu for devs, product ran on modified Slackware. Large scale retail/POS.
Not us. And worse the guy in charge loves edge and hates firefox.
My company uses Ubuntu on a few products they sell to customers, but it's only a relative few devs that use desktop Linux as a daily driver.
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