if it’s a large enough company, expect them to have systems administrators (sometimes called systems engineers nowadays) to exert control over their windows systems using either active directory or azure iam policies.

there are multiple ways to get a linux system to comply with those policies; but that doesn’t matter since they’ll make the case to management that the extra operational costs of either getting your system to become compliant or providing you with support will hurt the budget and/or suck up extra bandwidth for support.

your best bet in such cases are to offer written agreements that you will never seek out IT’s help and you will take full responsibility if you’re not able to get your work done because your linux system and provide a plan written down for each eventuality you can think of when your linux system doesn’t work as expected.

i would also expect your manager to reject your request despite these efforts unless you’re a highly enough paid individual contributor or have a special enough relationship with upper management.

If you work for a larger company, they will likely want you to keep using what they already have, not because Linux can’t do the job but because it’s a PITA to maintain different devices.

It’s funny because I’m not allowed to use a Linux machine as a main system but all the appliances I build run Linux so I built myself one of those machines to be able to test my other machines because my windows machine is so locked down I can’t do anything with it. So every day I have to ssh into my Linux test bench to test our products it’s annoying

Does your company have a serious IT department that manage devices?

If yes, then you’ll need to do whatever they say, and be ready to be told that’s not happening.

If not, I’d suggest a stable distro, encrypt the disk, and use flatpak/nix to install fresh packages. Fedora could work, but I’ve had bad luck with it, and wouldn’t want to risk my device crapping out because of an update.

The rest is really going to depend on your work and your it department.

You probably will be told no. However, it never hurts to ask. I would go for bring your own device as that will allow you to set it up in a way that works for you.

Linux VM with 90% of cpu and memory. Use it for almost everything. Have it configured as NAT so it can share the vpn connection from the host laptop.

Most startups I’ve applied to are Linux friendly.

I currently work for a fortune 100 and managed to get a Linux machine purchased as a “lab” machine.

I’m fully in control. IT doesn’t even know it exists. I’m not allowed on the corporate network, but I managed to get some internal corporate access through another department’s lab network (IT sanctioned) that has a VPN with a few routes to things like ticketing, time cards, and our internal wiki. Most of the stuff I need to do my job is in AWS and we are allowed to add home IPs to the security groups.

IT still gives me a MacBook. I use it like once every 6 months.

nixos-unstable is the only thing I will use currently.

I’m running bleeding edge stuff like the latest kernel, Hyprland nightly, my own “shell” built from Gnome components and lots of custom stuff using GJS (Gnome JavaScript).

If you get one, and you are free to do whatever on it, encrypt your drives like your job depends on it. I have a memorized passphrase, pin protected hardware key, and a key in TPM. No biometrics.

As far as other nice things to have:

• VPN: https://www.infradead.org/openconnect/ supports some common enterprise VPNs.
• Communication tools (Teams, WebEx, Zoom, Slack, etc.). I tend to have access to 90% of what I need. My team is thankfully accommodating for the couple features I have issues with. Make sure you test things like Screen Sharing especially in Wayland if you use it.
• VM: If you can get a corporate licensed image to run a corporate licensed version of Office, I recommend it. Office365 for web is missing a few features and often renders differently from native.
• Password Manager and encrypt everything. System is encrypted as previously stated. My home volume (BTRFS) is encrypted with a different key/passphrase. My work’s sensitive files are encrypted yet again using rclone with different keys. I try to minimize attack surfaces by unlocking only what I need when I need it.
• Backups. I use rclone to backup to our corporate OneDrive. Nixos is immutable and I have it setup with impermanence where every reboot is like a fresh install if I didn’t codify it my nixos-config which is tracked in git. I persist a few cache and setting directories in my home directory, but not much. I can restore my setup in like 20 minutes if I ever lost my machine.
• Virtual mic and camera for noise suppression and blurring for communication tools that don’t have it built in.
• Evolution EWS works okay as an Exchange email client. I had to hunt some weird settings like tenant ID to get it to work. I’ve been using Webmail or Outlook in a VM more often though as of late.

I work in software dev as FYI. For the few issues I have, my team has more issues getting stuff working consistently on macOS for our project. I used that as a justification when requesting the laptop: my dev environment should closely match our runtime environment. Most of that is moot now since we use Nix flakes in our repos for local dev envs.

I work at a microsoft based company and I am running Linux on my machine after getting approval from my IT security people.

I do need to set a couple of things up, for my machine to still be compliant with the company policies.

So far that is:

• Enrolled in Intune (via microsoft’s intune portal app)
• Full Disk Encryption (pretty standard these days)
• Microsoft Defender Endpoint (a requirement many companies have)
• Strong passwords that’s changed pretty often

But whether you are allowed to or not, really depends on your IT department and the company policies.

The main selling point of business windows is Active Directory. I’m not aware of a Linux or FOSS alternative for it (I never looked). At a certain size, companies will want to have all computers log in via a central server and be able to remotely access and control any such machine

It Depends.™

I work for a large state university and run linux on my office machine, despite the fact the IT office dept doesn’t officially support it. I told our IT guy once what I’m doing and his response was, “cool.” Of course I’m totally on my own if anything goes wrong. It helps that I’m a prof and most of my on-campus work doesn’t involve much time on a computer, aside from basic web and documents stuff. tldr, in my case I’m able to just do it without asking anyone’s permission, and it’s worked out great for several years now, but a lot of jobs aren’t like that obviously.

In my previous job I ran my main laptop with Linux. Pain points:

• MS Teams liked to crash on screen sharing
• o365 email and calendar works best on Evolution, but still is not perfect
• meeting rooms often had special usb dongle to connect to the screen. That never worked on Linux.

Overall it was glorious.

I’d suggest one of the fedora atomic installs, maybe even get a couple renewed Thinkpads all set up, one with kde and one with gnome and let them play with them for a few days. I was the only engineer in my company that ran Linux and the bosses only concession was that I carry a windows PC too when he was onsite with me so he’d understand what I was doing, but he provided a nice one for me so I never complained.

How it’s set up depends on your business needs. We have a few hundred, and ow they’re set up and managed is defined by a dozen or so groups. Base image to deploy, then ansible and config management to set up the roles.

Users are generally authorised via AD using sssd. Some have very specific Groups which have normal user access and occasionally sudo privs for specific commands. SSH, RDP or physical access.

Our sysadmins have local users with root privs, but most administration is done at scale using ansible or Uyuni.

Like everything, least privilege is the best way. AD allows us to quickly control access if someone leaves or is compromised, but it could equally be done with any central LDAP system and groups.

Many orgs mandate this. You’ll be fine.

I used to roll out mint xfce edition or Qubes to our staff laptops, unless an employee asked for a specific distro. I think some used fedora.

Don’t use flatpak; its a security risk.