To not much official fanfare on Thursday, the Windows operating system turned 40 years old, marking four decades since Windows 1.0 debuted in the United States on November 20, 1985. Its midlife milestone comes with a crisis, though. Diehard Windows users are switching to Linux for a variety of reasons.
For one, gaming is finally better on Linux machines, which makes the moat Windows dug for itself a little more passable. Add to that the end of support for Windows 10 in October, the growing frustration among power users about Microsoft Recall, and the growing number of polarizing features, and power users are finding plenty of reasons to make the switch to Linux.
It’s unclear if the wave of Windows power users loudly moving to Linux has crested yet, or if this is just the beginning. That said, the past year has seen a flood of articles like this one, scores of posts on Reddit, and YouTube videos documenting and occasionally evangelizing the conversion to Linux.
Endpoint (device) management is mostly a solved a problem, the challenge lies in integrated systems that allow secured, controlled, and constant access to data in a way that is manageable at scale by hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of users.
That is where it gets wicked difficult and is what @[email protected] is referencing. To my knowledge there is no real F/OSS equivalent to the tooling that MS Entra provides for IAM, DLP and MDM. You can maybe get close with a full deployment of NextCloud but that’s really only replicating M365 functionality from 15 years ago.
Is it ultimately possible if you piece enough packages and systems together? Probably but it would be a massive plate of spaghetti that only a team of highly experienced *nix managers could hope to properly support.
You can definitely use a full F/OSS stack to replicate the functionality of a Windows Active Directory network but that’s so last century. Today’s organizations, no matter their type or size, demand more and they won’t move to F/OSS unless they can get it.