On Thu, 2010-08-26 at 10:00 -0600, Dave Smith wrote: > Thanks for the info. Do you know if lots of other companies have also > done this?
Completely eliminated Windows? Not many. Obviously it's possible to a small company off from Windows. For as long as I've worked at GL we've had only one Windows install, a terminal server. Most employees do all of their work in Linux. (But then we're kinda the definition of an outlier.) Every Red Hat employee I've seen runs RHEL on their work machine. Novell made a big announcement about getting rid of Windows, but I don't think it actually happened. IBM made an announcement about moving a large number of employees to Linux, but when you did the math it turned out to be only a fraction (10% ?) of their workforce. Most of the success cases I've read about have actually been city governments, or government projects. In all cases, they required a significant commitment to building custom solutions. http://www.largo.com/department/index.php?fDD=24-0 http://davelargo.blogspot.com/ http://www.canonical.com/content/andalusia-deploys-220000-ubuntu-desktops-schools-throughout-region http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4602325.stm Even if you do completely eliminate Windows, you haven't solved the problem. Running Linux isn't enough; every employee's machine has to be kept up to date with patches. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramen_worm Whereas there's software to monitor frequently disconnected Windows machines, there's much less software to monitor Linux. Perhaps some employees could be moved to a thin client solution, but since you're probably most interested in solving the problem for software and hardware engineers, the truth is it won't be easy. My suggestion is that you help management to understand just how much productivity will be hurt by a solution that forces Linux users to use Windows. If you can make a credible claim that it'll have an impact, you can encourage the investigation of an alternate solution. There are proxy solutions that claim to detect the host OS so that one set of policies can be defined for Windows and a different set for Mac OS and Linux. I've never been behind one, but perhaps it'd be worth investigating. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */