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Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

about.gitlab.com

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Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#211
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are missing an important point: engineers want to use the tools that work best for them. They don’t care much about the things they can’t see. Taking a job with a super restrictive IT environment that would prevent me from doing my job effectively would be a deterrent to work for that company. I know many people who feel similar to this. The opportunity cost of not being able to hire those people or giving them o…

I've rarely seen individuals be very happy with Linux / Unix outside a few very dedicated, stereotypical hacker-types. Safe to say anecdotes don't work.

I'd also think twice about the consequences of these decisions. If Gitlab and co decide Linux/Mac is the answer for market share, it's only a matter of time before hackers start targeting those platforms en masse. If the answer to Windows was restriction galore, I fail to see how humans won't repeat history and do the same to Unix.

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They specifically mention Dell laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled.

If you follow the link to the model in their page, it selects the default version with Windows 11 PRO. You can explicitly choose Ubuntu, but it‘s not the default. My point here is „acquiring the license for a windows based laptop is a non-issue if you‘re willing to spend the 70USD it costs.“.

The problem is generally less the individual pro license and the associated enterprise licensing costs that come with managing said device in Azure AD/InTune.

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm not mistaken they rolled this idea back real quick once it leaked and everyone got mad.

It looks like they only announced it yesterday... and yes have already rolled it back? But for... "Now makes vague pledge to shove inactive repos into slow object storage." Not sure what that means. If the project isn't still available at the web and git URL it always was, that's a problem for open source. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/05/gitlab_reverses_delet... It's kind of shocking to me that they didn't rea…

> It looks like they only announced it yesterday... and yes have already rolled it back?

They didn't really "announce" it, the plans were leaked.

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#218

> As many purchases of laptops have occurred with employees making the purchases and then being reimbursed by GitLab, a remote employee would typically be making a purchase of a laptop pre-loaded with Windows Home Edition. Windows Home Edition is notoriously hard to secure. This is a totally valid point. Anyone who has worked for big companies know how companies secure systems using security policies which are not av…

>Windows Home Edition is notoriously hard to secure.

This is bullshit. In Windows 10 Home the Group Policy Editor is removed, and domain-join is not supported, however bulk security changes (i.e. Security Policies) can still be implemented directly to the registry with scripting.

Re: Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

#219
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This document seems to be about the machines that employees at Gitlab are given, not about target machines for testing and deploying software. They probably have some Windows machines at Gitlab for verifying the experience of Gitlab users/customers who use Windows. I imagine a developer doing that would have a dedicated Windows machine, or possibly a guest VM, for that activity.

You're never going to get the same coverage with some test VMs compared to people actually using the product on their primary machine every day.

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