#Linux desktops would be used by businesses a lot more if managing them wouldn't be so cumbersome and/or expensive.
For non-enterprises there are currently two options to manage Linux desktops centrally: fidgeting with #Ansible or buying #Ubuntu Landscape at $150/year. In our non-profit case, $7500 is too expensive.
Unless the #opensource world comes up with either easy to use OR affordable management tools, the year of the Linux desktop will unfortunately remain far away.
@mdbekhit Dsh sounds a lot like Ansible. I've never heard of Cockpit, I'll have look. Thanks!
@Gina Are you only looking at the 'book price' or have you spoken to someone in our sales team about those prices?
@popey book price, there's no mentioning of any sort of discounts on the website.
@sean @popey yeah but that's the thing. Sure a discount would be great, but many NGO's and SMBs don't have the time or energy to email a sales dept. They might not speak the language or even know that a discount is possible (and I still don't know). It takes 5 minutes to order a bunch of Msft stuff, and via Techsoup non-profits basically get everything Msft for free. Again, I just wish it would be a bit less cumbersome or expensive to choose #opensource.
@Gina RedHat and SUSE have nothing in this regard?
@fabian #RedHat offers Satellite for the enterprise and Spacewalk for free. I''ve looked at Spacewalk before and I believe it's only for RH derivative distro's such as Fedora and Centos. We've chosen to use Linux Mint.
I have no idea what SUSE offers. I know them least of all distro's and as they say in my native language; the unknown is unloved.
@dirk What other solutions?
@dirk Do you mean Windows and MacOS or other Enterprise Linux distro's?
@dirk Sorry Dirk but that's currently not relevant to me and I don't feel like looking it up.
@dirk Again, I'm not a msft admin. We've made an estimation at the time of Techsoup prices and stuff we needed (West-EU).
From what I remember, Get Genuine Win10 licenses were €8 (x 50 = €400). Standard Edition Win2016 server is 16 x €7 = €112. Then there was a mgmt tool (System Center Orchestrator? Again, not a Win sysadmin) that I remember being €12 per user (x 50 = €600). That add up to €1120, but I'm sure that's not all so let's say we double it. That's still a lot less than €7500.
@dirk if you do mean Windows go check out pricing on Techsoup, it's pretty cheap (for Msft). We have reasons to choose and support #Linux though, so we'd like to make that work and possibly contribute to solutions that enable its adoption businesswise. I honestly have no idea what MacOS management tools cost because I would never use MacOS.
@Gina Can't deny there should be more solutions and an easier path to moving a IT department to Open-Source. But their are tools out there now, some good, some bad, some free, some epensive.
@jordan31 Absolutely, but there's no guide or best practices blog about what tools to use. And to then see a nice shiney tool that could fix all your issues, but being very expensive makes this whole "let's smash large tech monopolies by making ethical choices" thing a bit frustrating. It shouldn't be this hard to not choose GAFAM.
@Gina Note this down. Be the first to write a blog about it. I can't relate to you on this level, but on smaller scale and different areas, I know struggle and annoyances.
@Gina I manage/administer #Linux for 20 years now and cannot confirm that was/is cumbersome and/or expensive. Maybe you're looking after the wrong tools and/or distributions. There are a lot of them. Ubuntu is not the one that I would use.
#Linux desktops would be used by businesses a lot more if the #FOSS people would pay the same attention to the managers as $MS does.
Why should the FOSS people not be paid for their work? Free as in "free speech" not as in "free beer"...
@teclador what tools and distro's would you recommend?
@Gina For businesses I prefer stable distributions like Debian or RHEL/CentOS, private ArchLinux/Fedora. Config goes with Puppet; virtual machines with oVirt (the easy one) or Ganetti (more complicated); version control is fine with Git; a bunch of window managers can be used for different people ... There are tools for everything. Most of the cost is the time to figure out what you want to use and/or the time for your own tools in your preferred prog language. And you have great communities.
@Gina I agree w/u there - but some will say that the problem is that linux/unix are different from windows and that is the problem - I would say they are equally awkward
@Gina oops misread that !! here is a link to start https://opensource.com/article/18/6/linux-remote-desktop
@Gina There is dsh. You can issue one command to update all machines for eg. through ssh.
Add the IP list to its configuration file. For fine tuning each computer I like using Cockpit. Not sure if these help.