Hello everyone, my company (our department is of around 150+ developers/machine learning people/researchers) is currently considering switching from Windows to Gnu+Linux for company devices (as in the machines we use in our daily work) and we are currently in the phase of collecting requirements. I’m not in charge of the process or involved in the decision phase, but as an enthusiast I’m curious about it. We handle data and other sensitive resources, so the environment should remain managed by the IT department (what’s possible to install, VPNs, firewalls, updates and similar). What do companies generally use in this kind of scenario? I’m assuming they generally do some stuff with either Canonical or Red Hat, but are there alternatives? Are there ways to do something that works across distributions by using flatpak or the nix package manager? What are your experiences?
Putting on my enterprise hat, most companies are going to want some form of paid support. Canonical and Suse are probably the two trustworthy players in that space (from an enterprise perspective, I really don’t trust Canonical) now that RedHat has developed some form of paranoia. If it were up to me I’d push for SUSE. I think Nix is super great and fantastic but I’m a DevOps engineer, not a support desk engineer, so I view deployments and support differently than someone who has to answer questions about how to open email