Linux

Local 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.

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.

We have both Linux and Windows machines in my team. We do all the work in Linux, and register hours in Windows. We also all have iPhones that we only use for 2FA.

I opened up the floodgates at my office dedicating support for anyone wanting to. All our servers and production are Linux so probably 1/4 of the staff is cli literate.

So far it's me with NixOS and one other guy running Debian.

Half the remaining use WSL.

I work for a company in Texas, USA. We actively discourage Windows being used in our organization and push people to use macOS or Linux.

Hostpoint, one of the largest hosting companies of Switzerland uses Linux Clients.

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.

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.

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.

When I was working for Averitt Express, a trucking company out of Cookeville, Tn, our yard trucks had computers in them (for yard and dock management) that ran Ubuntu. This was 10ish years ago.

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!

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.

Yes. At one employer, we had an entire domain in our AD forest that was Red Hat / CentOS / Ubuntu workstations for the developers.

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.

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.

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 :)

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 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"

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.

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.

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.

I'm a contractor and I use linux if that counts :D

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lots of arcade games and other amusement machines made in the last twenty years run on desktop Linux.

Incredible Technologies games, Raw Thrills/Play Mechanix Big Buck Hunter Pro, Arachnid dartboards, and TouchTunes jukeboxes off the top of my head.