Linux

At our office (and probably in many) the developers mostly use Linux and the other people often use windows for Microsoft stuff like Word, Excel, and other windows specific software. We can't really choose, everyone is forced to use Linux for development so we all have a more or less the same environment

I think there are a few small companies that use it. Additionally it is used by some developers.

Before Chromebooks, my towns school system had netbooks which were pitifully slow on Windows. They installed Ubuntu instead. The netbooks still sucked, but probably sucked a lot less.

Well, I wouldn't really say that it's used as a Windows replacement at the company I'm working at, because all the business stuff is still being done using Windows, but almost all developers are using Linux. I was even allowed to replace Ubuntu with Arch, because I was annoyed by outdated packages. Because of the higher freedom, I can even tolerate the slightly smaller pay rate and benefits that I could earn elsewhere.

We are mostly working on EDA tooling.

I've set up Linux machines for a school that had ancient computers and $0 computer lab budget. Within 2 years, they purchased new Apple computers.

Plenty of software developers use Linux for their work.

We use windows at my work (I've been using Linux for 2 decades on home computer). I'm trying to migrate our work CPUs to Linux but the biggest road block is my unfamiliarity with librecad, I'm used to autocad. I use cad command line a lot and it's hard to live without auto suggest commands. Libre has the capability but it's very rough and not mature.

We have primarily used windows servers, but our datalake, data warehouse and internal apps are on Linux servers.

Myself and several of !y coworkers use Linux at work bit, to be fair, it is a tech job.

companies that do IC design, do it under linux. traditionally they were using proprietary unixes, but today it is mostly linux and redhat or compatible systems.

engineers are using rhel workstations from dell and hp that are supported by vendors to work under linux: let's say bios updates are possible to run from within linux.

their whole workflow depends on unix with many custom scripts (shell, perl, tcl) and simulations, usage of shared filesystems, and even x forwarding.

afaik IT departments in such companies aren't happy to support linux workstations and the trend is to move the workflew to linux servers and let the engineers to connect to those via ssh, vnc or x or commercial solutions like 'citrix'.

my understanding is also that companies design some requirrments, though maybe based on what is available on the market, and love to have support and solutions that are integrated with each other. microsoft still has everybody hooked up, their 'active directory' feels to IT people necessary, they also use microsoft's disk encryption, and/or third party windows software which encrypts everything written to usb flash drives to prevent leakage of what they call 'intellectual property'.

it is of course possible to do luks encryption of linux disk drives, but afaik rhel doesn't support it, or rhel versions these companies tend to use, since they tend to use very outdated systems, even eol unsupported systems, because 'customers still use those'.

i am also not aware of linux versions of those draconian services that encrypt everything that gets written to the flash drives, or that monitor/control computer usage, web requests, etc, so companies are interested to concentrate unix systems in data centers and get rid of linux end user workstations because these require custom approaches or draconian control software is not available, while windows users can be controlled better, with available corporate solutions.

25 years ago I worked at a university computer lab that was Windows-heavy because Dell wouldn't stop donating PCs. However we didn't have enough UNIX workstations as we had to pay for Sun / HP / IBM out of pocket. Converting them to Linux workstations would be nice because the Dells had more grunt than the aging RISC workstations.

I proposed to switch a few desks worth to Debian and was given the go-ahead. After a few days learning how to preseed an installation image and getting a PXE server going I had 8 machines running CDE just like the AIX and HP/UX boxes. Users that didn't need one of the commercial engineering applications tied to one OS or another didn't notice any difference between the free (now as in both speech and beer) Dells and the proprietary workstations.

A couple of months after we got the pilot rolling, the university's IT director came to check it out and told me we're on the "lunatic fringe" for deploying an OS developed by volunteers, but otherwise offered approval as long as we could maintain security and availability.

Now every student in our local school district gets issued a Chromebook running Linux under the hood. Who's the lunatic now?

Linux the past 15 years across 4 different companies. CentOS, Ubuntu, then Arch. Now I'm stuck with MacOS, and it's worse in every single way except laptop battery life of the M2. Which, is nice when moving around. I'd still prefer a more powerful desktop computer since I'm 99% of time time in one of two places.