this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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5 reasons you should ditch Windows for Linux today (www.zdnet.com)
submitted 1 week ago by Sunshine@piefed.social to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Any Tipps on how to do that in a business environment?

Simply replacing MS Office with LibreOffice and Nextcloud for example does not cut it. The tight integration of MS Teams, Office and Cloud functionality is seen as a huge benefit there and I can't just take that away from them unless I find a combination of tools that work in a similar fashion.

You just answered your own question; you can’t. Add in Group Policy Management and Active Directory and there is no windows replacement in any other OS.

Now mix in O365 and it just got more complicated.

If anyone knows of a 1:1 Linux equivalent for AD, GP, and DFS (both replication and namespace) I’d love to learn about it.

[–] Illecors@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Only answering your last paragraph. You will not, ever, find a 1:1 equivalent for a few reasons, but mostly because:

  • Windows quircks do not have to be accomodated in Linux distros
  • Microsoft has very much encouraged massive software where everything is done in a single application, whereas in UNIX world the philosophy is to do one thing and do it well.
  • Not sure how DFS works, but with the myriad of networked filesystems available I'm sure there's an exact requirement match.

Users can be centrally managed in a myriad of ways, but the most used software seems to be following the same X.500 standard - OpenLDAP, FreeIPA, etc.

Machines can be centrally managed via Puppet, Chef, etc.

Company software is managed by having your own repo.

SELinux can be used for incredibly granular access controls, but I can't see most companies actually needing that.

To sum it up - you'll always have trouble if you're solving a windows problem in linux and vice versa. Just for a moment, try imagining a situation where you want to switch a 100% linux company to windows.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ok, so, no. There’s nothing that exists that’s a 1:1 for Active Directory and the services that come along with it.

This is why companies aren’t switching to Linux in mass.

[–] Lehmanator@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago

OpenLDAP does.

There's not much to replace GPOs, but you can conditionally provision most settings on NixOS. Would be nice to build an MDM around Nix.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

To sum it up - you'll always have trouble if you're solving a windows problem in linux and vice versa. Just for a moment, try imagining a situation where you want to switch a 100% linux company to windows.

I can’t imagine that; not that it doesn’t exist but it’s rare.

[–] Illecors@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think you're missing the point of what I'm saying. Unfortunately, words are difficult enough to produce for me, I don't have a better way to express it.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

That it doesn’t exist?

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago

FreeIPA only really covers authentication and authorization. It also don't work well for remote devices such as someone's work device at home.

To properly manage a fleet of Linux devices you need some way of keeping all devices configured the same

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Friends don't let friends use DFS

Seriously though it is prone to combustion

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Distributed File System?