Free and Open Source Software

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How being FOSS fan/advocate annoy you at work/school? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Started my first job, it's a helpdesk. It looks that I get tickets and try to help people on the other side, have build some PCs and am at first week.

But after ~3 years of using almost exclusive FOSS, I found out corporate software (especially Windows!) to be so absolutely unbearable.

Having Windows as example, on the surface it is bearable, but as I need to do more advanced stuff, oh GOD!
I needed iperf3 to test LAN speed, traceroute to test why some device is not responding, rsync to copy files... But none of it is installed and installing every single program is super annoying and troublesome. After that I get countless update popups from all sides, ugh.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago

Like it or not, commercial computing is primarily Microsoft environments. Businesses are moving to Azure/O365, but there's still a lot of on-prem AD out there, and a lot of businesses that are stuck in between with some form of hybrid hodge-podge. It's definitely more difficult to do admin tasks for individual Windows endpoints vs. Linux, but on the other hand there is no FOSS equivalent for AD forest management. In a corporate environment, the ability to manage large numbers of endpoints at scale is more important.

You probably shouldn't be using iPerf3 on Windows, but instead use the native nttcp.

tracert is included with Windows by default, no need to install a separate utility. robocopy is also included with Windows and can be used to do incremental backups if that's your use case.

If you have to manage Windows systems you should learn about Windows-native tools, rather than trying to drag the Linux-native tools you're used to onto Windows just for the sake of familiarity.

That said, installing (and updating) software on Windows is absolutely a pain compared to the relative simplicity of a Linux package manager and I'm 100% with you on that. I highly recommend chocolatey, which attempts to work as a package manager for Windows. All of the software that you install with chocolatey can be updated with a single command, similar to running updates in a package manager on Linux. If you can implement this on the Windows systems that you have to manage, it will make things easier.