The company I work for insists on having windows on every work laptop although the work I do doesn't require windows. I bought a new hdd, replaced the old one and installed gentoo. Not sure if they could fire me if they found out, however my productivity increased from the first day on.

Well if they would fire you you would be better off. I prefer windows but you should have freedom of OS choice.

@Codex404 Well, the thing is that I love this company. My boss is chilled as fuck, my colleagues are very nice and you can work with them perfectly in a team. They pay really well and I can come and go whenever I want. The windows thing is the only one that really bothers me.

@wildcard if your boss is chilled they dont mind you using another OS right?

@Codex404 he wouldn't, but the it department, which manages the equipment does.

@wildcard well if the IT people tell your boss you are not using windows what would your boss do?

@Codex404 they tell him I opened my laptop and replaced the drive. I don't think he would fire me, that was more like a hyperbole, but I don't want them to know anyway ^^

Same problem. My current solution is Gnome via Cygwin. If I need a proper Unix-like environment, I SSH into an Ubuntu server.
It's really not perfect, but the best option at the moment.

That's actually not surprising in the slightest. From a security and maintenance perspective, Windows is the easiest for companies to support, and it has virtually no learning curve at all. Should your computer crash and need to be replaced, it makes their lives much more difficult if you use Linux. You can tell me to fuck off and tell me how they SHOULD operate, but I'm just saying how it is.

@TheBardAbaddon Please don't use the words Windows and security in the same context.
They don't mix properly 🤓

@TheBardAbaddon Maintaining Linux clients is much easier than Windows, because of proper package management. The problem is that the people that are usually responsible for client management are those who spent their lives collecting Microsoft certifications.

@krister-alm @3141 Like I said, it doesn't make sense but you know that's how it works. Linux makes more sense all around but also it's not mainstream and thus is not supported nearly as much as Windows.

@krister-alm This was my first thought 😆

@rantalicious Windows lags as hell on it, gentoo however is hardly even slow unless I'm compiling something huge

@rantalicious The problem is that this might not be up to the boss. There could be several layers of bureaucracy above him. If there is some central IT policy which would clearly be violated here, the firing might be initiated by some bureaucratic process where the boss isn't even involved. It really depends on the company.

I just dual boot on the company's drives.The best parts of Windows and Linux usually aren't so great in a VM and I have some crazy SSD that boots in about 3 seconds.

Wouldn't buy stuff myself to fix work problems.