Technology

As someone in German Government who has written a thesis on OSS in government:

Happens regularly, on a small scale, but almost always eventually leads to a rollback to Windows. People are discontent with the solutions on Linux since they have to get used to something else, and the aging governmental workers and exactly very keen on things changing.

The City of Munich had a similar program of switching to Linux before, only took Microsoft to open an office in the city to revert on those plans.

The federal government recently finished rolling out a centralised, unified client around all of their ministries and other institutions. Which OS? Guessed it, Windows 10.

Dont get me wrong, having something like the French Police would be amazing, but the highly federal nature and old workforce of government make it super unlikely for Linux to have a proper chance. Taking into consideration the lack of suitable employees to drive forward such a change, the lack of money at local government levels and the fact that most of the specific software required doesn't have a version for Linux doesn't fill me with hope.

I want more entities to switch to Linux like that, but that's unlikely in the near future. Most offices have Windows professional or enterprise (LTSC) which don't have most of the bullshit regular Windows has.

Yea, Apple very briefly started making effort to support enterprise in the 90's, but quickly gave up the effort. I don't remember it well, it may have been related to the PowerPC stuff they were doing with IBM (IBM dropped their support of the PowerPC project, unfortunately).

Windows is an enterprise OS with consumer features and MacOS is a consumer OS with (half assed) enterprise "features".

Wow, I've been in IT for a long time, and this is the best way I've ever seen to describe the difference.

Eh, it kind of depends imo. Apple's MDM is pretty great, they just don't offer any real alternatives to AD, Exchange, etc. and integrating Macs into a Windows environment definitely does make some of the "it just works" magic evaporate quickly.

For a small business willing to go all in and do everything the Apple way I can see it being quite attractive though. Managed Apple IDs through Apple Business Manager for use with iCloud, Automated Device Enrolment with zero-touch provisioning straight out of the box and a robust MDM solution like Jamf make for a pretty neat package. It's just not one that will appeal to every business, especially large ones or ones with a desire or requirement to keep things on-prem and in-house.

Apple definitely has a very long way to go to become any kind of real competition to Microsoft in the enterprise market, but with MS pushing more and more cloud stuff themselves (O365, Azure) I reckon it's only a matter of time before they start neglecting things like AD and Exchange. And more people using Apple at home means employees and decision makers will start wanting to use that stuff at work too, for better or worse.

I'm not saying Apple will dethrone MS or anything, in fact I don't think a future with Apple being a significant player in the enterprise market is particularly likely. But I think if MS screws up enough and Apple play their cards right, it's not impossible.

Oh, yea!

The other area I meant to mention related to engineering is external device control.

Things like specialized controllers for things like CNC, many of which won't even run on NT-based systems, and still have to run Windows 9x to have the DOS-level hardware control.

her printer was out of paper and she couldn't find her eye glasses to read the error message.

Hahahah, omg that's awesome.

To me this user exemplifies where Linux shines: in limited-use-case scenarios (not to say it's inflexible, just that support increases quickly with increased use-case complexity).

The more general-use needed, the more technical skill is required.

This user has a small set of specific requirements, so it's pretty trivial to get them running on a Linux distro, and it's a great application of what Linux brings to the table. System management will be minimal.

For people who consider this a sign of social status

Ok well,

1. Anyone who considers apple products a status symbol already has bought in and won't be swayed one way or the other by windows becoming worse.

2. Anyone who actually understands technology knows that regardless of how many different apps or environments apple OS's provide, you are always operating in a closed system with the tools they allow. Whereas an operating system like android, or Linux, or (at least for now) windows, your options for the capability of a tool are limited only by what exists or what you have the capability to write.

In short, apple isn't an OS that technologically literate people flock to as an exclusive option.

Apple definitely has a shit category, it’s the entry level with 8GBs of RAM. Completely unusable unless you’re only running a single app at a time.

As much as I don't want to give LTT credit, I think Linus has a point with Chromebooks. Google is playing the long game with them. Students almost exclusively use them these days, and anecdotally, most of them are getting chromebooks and the like for college now that they're getting to that age. That's at least been the case for almost every family member I've had that's started college in the last 5 years.

It's only going to continue as the average Chromebook legitimately is becoming more powerful, and Steam compatibility is improving. You're going to see a whole lot of people who see no need for a PC/mac.

I'm not so sure about Chromebooks not being a threat, at least for people who just want to browse the web. A crappy laptop that Windows 11 will bring to its knees will run ChromeOS well. If people compare the performance of both OS's on an equivalently priced laptop, they'll notice ChromeOS is way faster and buy it. To get the equivalent OS performance of a $300 Chromebook, you need a $1000 Windows laptop.