Note: Tagged “general” because the fediverse is disproportionately in favor of Linux/FOSS.

In the past, I wouldn’t hold this opinion, but as Windows has become increasingly dumbed down and clouded up, it’s become something of a sore spot to deal with Windows folks.

If something goes wrong and you ask a Windows admin for logs? Good luck. In all fairness, Windows logging is pretty terrible if the software uses the Event logger. Still, pulling logs or checking for obvious issues along those lines is a foreign concept to 90+% of them. Their first action is to reboot. If that doesn’t fix it, go crying to the vendor.

I liken them to “button pushers” who don’t know or care how the button works, why the button works, etc. Is it possible, or even likely, that Windows creates more clueless badmins by sheer size of their market share? Absolutely. But the real problem is that few of them seem intent to actually learn what’s going on under the hood, how, or why. By and large, they care only that when they click “this” button, “that” happens.

  • @blackstratAEnglish
    4•6 days ago

    And yet Linux still doesn’t have an answer to administering large organisations through a mechanism similar to AD or GPOs

    • Admiral PatrickOPMEnglish
      0•6 days ago

      For AD, there’s Samba and SSSD. If you want something way more granular, you can do LDAP + Kerberos. I’ve had the latter running my stack since 2015. I’ve even got all my DHCP, DNS, Asterisk, XMPP, Matrix, and Postfix/Dovecot config/users backed by LDAP, so I’ve basically got the equivalent of an AD + Exchange + Cisco Unified Communications server going.

      For GPO, though, fair point. Though with SELinux/AppArmor, proper group setups, and a good base configuration, is GPO really needed? It’s also way easier in Linux to just make a secured base image and deploy it to a fleet of PCs. Tools like Ansible can (and are) also used for config and state management for mass deployments (and mostly filling the same role as GPO).

      Been a while since I looked into the GPO equivalent, but in general, Linux doesn’t try to micromanage endpoints to quite that degree (e.g. THOU SHALT NOT CHANGE THE DESKTOP WALLPAPER).