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Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

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Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#181

Post by jeffwask »

muttled wrote: post #131
Xylakant wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I‘m a bit surprised that they care about the cost so much - the Dell laptops and the Apple Laptops come in at a price point of 2000 - 3000 USD and the Dell they specifically recommend for Linux use comes with Windows Pro preinstalled. The price difference to the equivalent Linux version is around 70USD. That‘s a negligible difference, especially when you start comparing to the employees wage (It‘s probably about 1 ho…

Most places I've worked at (Windows shops largely) had management tools that worked well on Windows but not as well on other devices. The IT staff was skilled largely in Windows, as well. The biggest argument against other OS options was that we simply did not have the tools and experience to effectively manage the other options. It's a valid argument, and seemed disingenuous to take digs at the other OS options when…

Microsoft Windows with AzureAd and Intune provides a suite of tools for managing your fleet of laptops at little to no additional cost. It's honestly so much for free that running any other suite of laptops becomes arduous and expensive. It all just works out of the box and it's easy to bolt things on. The viruses and malware argument is ludicrous if you do any amount of end point protection.

Apple is a walled garden. Everything is a degree of difficulty or two harder and you often run into weird ecosystem shit like some aspects of laptop mdm registration only working if the user has an iPhone. The tooling is 5-10 years behind, non-existent, or expensive because the third parties know they got you by the short and curlies.

Linux is a build your own from open source ecosystem and what understaffed overworked IT team has time for that. I mean Google manages their Linux laptop fleet by rolling their own distro. Never mind all the compatibility issues with other required tooling that may or may not work.

Some of these issue may have been easier to conquer in OnSite roles where laptops could be dropped at an IT cage but for full remote the Windows ecosystem has just gained more ground because of the iceberg of features most users never see.

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#182

Post by ironmagma »

marcosdumay wrote: post #176
ironmagma wrote: post #8

This is being posted just a day after this tweet: https://twitter.com/allenholub/status/1555324387087097856 I really wonder what it's like inside Gitlab. The product ticks all the boxes you'd want it to, but the user experience just resonates with sadness and misery.

I don't get it, is the complain about the "you can ensure your teams are working at the right things at the right time" part? How is wanting your products to be aligned with their vision evidence of dysfunction?

It implies a major problem in their org is/was pesky developers working on things that weren't assigned. Why weren't those things assigned? Bad PMs who don't care about the pain developers feel? Not enough developer freedom? The fact that the roadmap is completely disconnected from what's actually important for the business/developers? It's a product for developers; the developers should know better than anyone what the right things to work on are.

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#183

Post by dijit »

Kwpolska wrote: post #145
dijit wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're not really allowed to use those licenses in many contexts. Might be ok for a startup; but at Ubisoft we had to maintain a fleet of KMS infrastructure. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/...

Was your need to maintain KMS actually caused by a Microsoft requirement, or was it rather a cost saving and standarization measure?

It’s one of those “chicken egg” issues, ultimately it’s not enforced until certain scales.

Microsoft does not like >200 machines being activated from 1 IP/Site for example.

But you’ll run into issues running the “pro” version of windows, and you’ll need the enterprise version pretty early.

Computers don’t ship with enterprise, if any do then it’s certainly not all of them.

So you have to license all machines on your network anyway, volume licensing gets cheaper when it’s properly managed.

It’s hard to say there’s a hard limit, because there isn’t really one, but it’s sort of expected.

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#184

Post by awinder »

celdon25 wrote: post #156
habnds wrote: post #3

>> GitLab approves the use of Linux, and Apple's macOS. Microsoft Windows is prohibited for the following reasons: Due to Microsoft Windows' dominance in desktop operating systems, Windows is the platform most targetted by spyware, viruses, and ransomware. macOS is preinstalled on Apple computers and Linux is available free of charge. To approve the use of Windows, GitLab would have to purchase Windows Professional l…

> Due to Microsoft Windows' dominance in desktop operating systems, Windows is the platform most targetted by spyware, viruses, and ransomware. That may be true, but a much higher proportion of downloaded Mac software lacks code signing. Opting in to that as a developer on the Mac will carry a lot of risk of kafkaesque deactivation and, and most don’t want to deal with that. On Windows, on the other hand, it’s like g…

I can’t remember the last time I allowed an unsigned app to run on Mac, I can’t even think of examples recently where I’ve gone “oh **, this thing is unsigned?!”. I’d love examples of high quality apps without a basic codesigned certificate, maybe we have a disagreement over the term “quality”.

“App Store apps are garbage” is also kinda rich, it’s not windows, the Mac App Store is the go-to source for distributing Mac apps at this point. There’s some examples of popular apps not on the MAS but they grow fewer by the year.

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#185

Post by strix_varius »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #77
horsawlarway wrote: post #9

I'm no fan of Windows myself, but I find this a fairly bad policy. If nothing else - what's not used is not tested. And if you expect any real population of users to be using Windows machines with your products, you should have developers/PMs/QA/support interacting with your products using Windows machines. I see this as: We're saving a bit of money and making ITs life easier, and in exchange users will get a worse p…

Do you also expect that mobile devs do all their primary computing from their phone?

It's common for companies to encourage their dev workforce to use a broad variety of company-provided mobile devices so that, while dog-fooding, they get better coverage.

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#186

Post by cwbrandsma »

politelemon wrote: post #54

> Due to Microsoft Windows' dominance in desktop operating systems, Windows is the platform most targetted by spyware, viruses, and ransomware. This is poor reasoning and a misunderstanding of how security works. Any org should be happy with any OS, as long as sufficient security controls for it exist. Anyone who oversees Windows estates, or works in desktop security, can tell you that they exist and are extensive, a…

Considering all the security software my corporation forces on all of us, each product hammering my CPU and RAM while I try to compile...windows is an issue for developer productivity. (I'm a windows based developer, I feel the pain)

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#187

Post by ziddoap »

leeter wrote: post #52
seydor wrote: post #14

> Due to MacOs' dominance in GitLab, it is now most targetted by MacOs spyware, viruses, and ransomware who wish to steal corporate secrets.

This is why I find this policy ironic and silly. MacOS is the largest target of choice for bad actors as late because the ratio of high value/low chance of rejection users have migrated to Mac over the past few years because of the whole "Macs are safer" myth. To the point that an exploit for MacOS goes for a lot more money not because they are all that rare but because the value of the targets is greater. MacOS CVE…

>MacOS is the largest target of choice for bad actors as late

I work in cybersec and am in daily contact with a few threat analysts. Not one of them has said this or believes this. Do you have some reputable source that can confirm this, or is this just a feeling you have?

>Note how the windows ones are more up to date and patched faster?

The presence of, frequency of, and patching of CVEs has very little relation to real-life attack frequency and targets. People are still getting owned by EternalBlue on unpatched machines from 5 years ago, doesn't matter how fast the patch is released if people aren't applying it.

>That's because Mac only does major updates on a cycle and doesn't patch out of band ever

Same with Windows. Heard of Patch Tuesday? The regular cycle of once per month that Windows does updates? They avoid releasing updates on other days unless it is high severity and there is evidence of active exploitation, and when they do out-of-band security updates it's almost always covered in some media and/or CISA releases because out-of-band updates are noteworthy.

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#188

Post by pjmlp »

detaro wrote: post #173
pjmlp wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So their developers do indeed use Pixie dust when debugging Windows build pipelines and compilers.

Virtual machines aren't that magic I'd say, but sure, if you think they are pixie dust, then I guess its pixie dust...

No Windows allowed....

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#189

Post by miki123211 »

jchw wrote: post #25
horsawlarway wrote: post #9

I'm no fan of Windows myself, but I find this a fairly bad policy. If nothing else - what's not used is not tested. And if you expect any real population of users to be using Windows machines with your products, you should have developers/PMs/QA/support interacting with your products using Windows machines. I see this as: We're saving a bit of money and making ITs life easier, and in exchange users will get a worse p…

I mean, Gitlab is a web platform. It's pretty easy to test how it's going to work on different platforms without needing full machines. Heck, you can even just get Microsoft Edge binaries on macOS and Linux if you want to test Edge. But failing that, VMs are pretty sufficient.

Not if you're doing any kind of accessibility testing, and considering they want to sell to the US government, they will have to at some point.

Screen readers are not consistent across platforms, and things that work on Windows sometimes don't work on other platforms, and vice versa.

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#190

Post by [deleted] »

Diggsey wrote: post #66
jchw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, Gitlab is a web platform. It's pretty easy to test how it's going to work on different platforms without needing full machines. Heck, you can even just get Microsoft Edge binaries on macOS and Linux if you want to test Edge. But failing that, VMs are pretty sufficient.

Tell that to the FE devs who add `overflow: scroll` everywhere and don't spot the problem...

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