Discussion
Gang, if I were an org and I wanted to use #Linux for my workstations, I would be worried that the Linux desktop only holds together because it’s a pile of projects with a single maintainer assembled together.
1. How true is that for @kde? For @gnome?
2. Are there organizations providing paid support for the desktop use case?
3. Is there such a thing as fleet management for Linux? Active Directory support?
4. What needs to be tackled urgently to improve it?
@thibaultamartin Not quite ready yet, but worth keeping an eye on. Particularly if you’ll be migrating from Windows https://zorin.com/grid/
@thibaultamartin @kde @gnome
To keep it short.
There are some companies with 10,000 employees and since decades on the market.
Every bigger company like Red Hat, Canonical has paid support.
And there are a lot of system houses. You just need the ones also supporting Linux administration.
I don't think a NGO would overextend this requirements.😃
What I would advise you to ask current NGOs already using Linux to get their software bundle and start with this. If you find better fitting software feel free to change.
With your active usage and support you keep these ecosystems alive and not Windows, AWS and Google.
@thibaultamartin @kde @gnome > is there fleet management and AD support?
It's possible to cobble together sssd and ansible (or puppet, or probably a few other options) to do these, and RHEL probably has decent handling, but your point stands that it's not first class at all.
Not trying to be trite, but your fears of the unmanagable Linux desktop are overblown.
Not a coder, but been using Linux desktops since the 90's, and they've come a very LONG way.
1. It's not true for GNOME or KDE. Both are very solid desktops with consistent (but polar opposite) design philosophies, all of which are interoperable with each other.
3. Yes, Linux has literally ActiveDirectory integration for at least a decade. (see sssd)
1/2
2. Any admin who can install Linux desktops should have no real trouble finding support for doing so, but I'm not aware of any specific third-parties who offer support for this.
4. The best way to improve the Linux Workstation ecosystem is to implement it. Use it, distribute it to your workers. Build your processes with it, and discover the only real limitation to your setup is your own imagination/knowledge/deadlines. Nobody will come rent-seeking.
2/2
@thibaultamartin pinging @neal since he knows this stuff
@thibaultamartin isn't that true for any open source tech you might be using as a company, whether desktop, server, developer tools, etc?
Not to mention that lots of things have a single maintainer internally at big companies too, of course, it's just less visible :D
@tbernard a lot of OSS tools have a single maintainer, and that is why SBOMs are becoming a critical topic in procurement.
Lots of things have a single maintainer internally at big companies, but that's identified and the role is backfilled if the person leaves. You know what role needs to be backfilled.
If you use OSS and one of your dependencies goes poof but you don't know which, you can't really backfill it quickly.
Moving away from status quo to support OSS maintainers is desirable :)
@thibaultamartin oh sure, I think everyone agrees the status quo isn't good and we should find a way to fund maintainers, my point is just that this isn't unique to desktop.
As in, if your org has Linux on servers they're already exposed to the exact same issues there. And the solution is also the same: Pay Redhat/Suse/whoever to make it their problem rather than yours :)
@tbernard indeed, that’s my second question in the original post, I want to get a good idea of what are all the orgs ready to bear that responsibility :)
Have a look what you find unter https://ubuntu.com . There are enterprise options.
AFAIK there is AD and Group Policy support for Ubuntu.
Suse Linux and Red Hat should have similar options.
@thibaultamartin @kde @gnome RedHat provides paid support, so does TuxCare. Google, Amazon and pretty much all major tech company contributes financially and via devwork as their own systems operate on Linux.
RedHat develops FreeIPA which is essentially opensource Active Directory. Both AD and FreeIPA are fancy Kerberos wrappers around LDAP.
In most large proprietary software project a small amount of maintainers manage individual components of software. Everything critical in Linux is financially funded somewhere and somehow, anything else has enough passion devs working on it or has heaps of alternatives that can fill it's place is development disappeared.
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
