Microsoft Windows is prohibited at Gitlab

Post by Xylakant » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #223

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…

I didn't read it as cost, but management overhead. It's easily possible to secure a Windows computer in an enterprise environment. They are fully remote and primarily a Mac shop, so they don't have that expertise or infrastructure. If you are running Linux on a Dell, then they assume you have the ability to manage that yourself. I see this more as a function of them being fully remote more than anything else.

Post by Beltalowda » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

oneplane wrote: post #229

Beltalowda wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a self-identified $OPERATING_SYSTEM user because I have been using $OPERATING_SYSTEM for 20 years in much the same way, like how it works, have a lot of things set up for it which is not always easily portable (e.g. scripts and programs I wrote), and have a lot of $OPERATING_SYSTEM things hard-wired in to my brain and muscle memory. Can I spend time and effort changing that? Of course. But why fix something that…

> But why fix something that isn't broken? Because this can be a form of brokenness. Someone would be hired for their aptitude and probably not because of something they have already repeated over and over (unless we include factory work). The ability to adapt and create (and be creative) is usually not described as such in SWE work, but a lot of the actual work does include that. That said, if a job has a match base…

Post by trelane » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 6:19 PM UTC

Shorel wrote: post #91

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…

For many years, and in so many companies, the policy has been the opposite. All company laptops must have windows, anything else needs to be vetted by the IT admin. Now that the Edge browser works fine on Linux, there's really no need for all these licenses, and someone needs to start to break the unhealthy dependency every company has on Active Directory.

Post by switch007 » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 6:26 PM UTC

jaclaz wrote: post #93

Reading further on the page, the "Laptop Repair" part is interesting : >If your laptop is broken and needs to be repaired you can take it into an Apple repair store. You should ensure that you have a recent backup before doing so, and that your laptop is not your only registered device for iCloud two-factor authentication. >If the repair is not going to be too expensive (more than $1000 dollars USD), go ahead and rep…

Post by trelane » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 6:32 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #183

Kwpolska wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…