Can I haz Linux?!? Sure!

@ Snowman:
I love Linux and would support it if there was a chance.

With 700+ machines in the AD tree at the moment the prospect of a migration is far away. Of course you could have a couple of Linux machines, but having none at the moment means that any new ones would mean only unnecessary overhead.

I personally love to work in a heterogeneous environment. It's lovely, it mimics the real world. But I cannot possibly see the 2 full time sysadmins being able to handle the workload for the system if it wasn't done as it is at the moment.



@TS:

I'll be happy to, no problem with that. Let's talk about it and set some time aside shall we?

why work for a huge company? Because we have to :).

@Genom - you are invited for coffee to our (http://www.marand.com) heterogeneous environment, so we can have a long chat about this and other topics ;)

@TS: About that Vista issue: http://www.ubuntu.com/. But srsly: It worked on other Vista systems... The problem could be in some faulty drivers or something. And like I've said - the problem lies in their swc library - nothing much I can do about it, unless we have the source of that too ;)


You kill creativity by forcing people to live in the early 90's. Sure, you can develop only on one platform and test on others, but that can often lead you into serious just before the deadline problems ;). And if you don't let people to feel at home, then they will not achieve their maximum productivity ;)



About the precious homogeneous environment - it doesn't matter. It just takes the right tools for the right job. Now, I use exclusively Linux and administering one Linux box is roughly the same as administering 10000 (provided they have similar hardware - same resolutions, ...). I wouldn't know how it's done with Windows and all it's licensing crap... But introducing Linux to any environment is (should be) a breeze for any man capable of at least minimal thought ;). Besides, if you have a dedicated sysadmin, he should work for his money ;).

@TS
Hm, you kill creativity how exactly? I don't really see your point there, as long as you can have the right tools for the job it shouldn't really matter what OS you're using.



Again I was stipulating this for big companies, small companies, start ups and such are obviously candidates for a heterogeneous environment. I see no problem in that.



Why would one work in such a company: be darned if I know, I wanna get out asap anyway (well as soon as I finish some stuff).

@Genom - hmmm, maybe you should change your employer :)

Snowman:
About the cross platform... you use one platform to program it on and then test it on test environments (aka other platforms). This means you can still keep a homogeneous network while only integrating the bare minimum of other / different systems.



I never said I agree with forcing one browser, I was simply stating that it happens, even though I don't like the idea.

As an IT worker (student) at a big firm I can tell you what a pain in the arse is only being able to use IE 6 to browse the net (I mean no tabs for god's sake - I feel like I'm in the dark ages).

It's sad - but true.

@Genom - well you kill creativity by forcing one OS, one browser, one theme and no software. as Byla said I think keeping your developers happy is very very important for productivity and costs...


It is hard to keep people motivated when you are restricting them.



I could agree with you about the "big company" issue, but why would one work in such a company? :)



@Snowman - cross-platform is a must, and you must have the tools to test it... (btw: we still have to fix a certain little issue on vista :P )

In my opinion, if a software company forces all developers to use a single OS, it inherently means that they're developing software for the early 90's (cross-platform say what?!)... If I had a company I'd encourage different systems, for maximum product compatibility and testing ;).


As for forcing a certain browser. I could not under any circumstances agree with that. However I did notice that in the non-IT companies, employees usually know absolutely nothing about computers ;).

Well, having multiple OSes in a company does introduce potential expand in maintaining cost, but if the developers are happy, so should the bosses, right?


From working for one of the biggest IT companies in the world, where everything is company tested, approved and certified, the non signed off software usage seems logic.



If you are a company of 100 and less, serving to personal wishes should not be a problem.

Exactly the wrong idea. The less people know about it the less problems you will have with administrating the machine itself. A "knowledgeable" user (programmers btw. are not normally sysadmins as well) will be less afraid of messing with the system and will generally create problems much worse than the newbie will.


About the IE part. It is mostly because you want a homogeneous environment to support, everyone using the same browser means less work for you since you don't have to know 3-5 browsers inside out.



I can tell you that managing 100 workstations of users with no privileges is a breeze while managing 100 workstations of admin level users would probably be a nightmare.



Let's go and look at the security advantage as well. A virus that gets into a system where the user has no rights cannot do any harm in all reality (root drive, program files, windows folders are all un-writable), so this is not only about the user.



In the end it's all about minimizing costs. If you're a big company with lots of workstations it's important to keep costs to a minimum. A small start up can manage an environment as you described it, but only up to a certain size. Then the costs ramp up too much.

Hm, IT departments force the use of IE in order to secure their existence by having to constantly fix problems on those machines? :)


I understand companies with computer illiterate personnel, but software development companies?!? Come on... people who develop software usually know how to manage a OS.

My dear friend you seem to be behind times... there are plenty and I mean PLENTY of companies who explicitly forbid the use of any browser escept for IE. Some even forbid / did not migrate IE 7.


About not allowing Linux and it being a danger to a widows domain? What kind of bollocks is that anyway... linux has less attack vectors than windows will ever have so they should have forbidden the use of windows as well. I LoLed...