Hello everyone, my company (our department is of around 150+ developers/machine learning people/researchers) is currently considering switching from Windows to Gnu+Linux for company devices (as in the machines we use in our daily work) and we are currently in the phase of collecting requirements. I'm not in charge of the process or involved in the decision phase, but as an enthusiast I'm curious about it. We handle data and other sensitive resources, so the environment should remain managed by the IT department (what's possible to install, VPNs, firewalls, updates and similar). What do companies generally use in this kind of scenario? I'm assuming they generally do some stuff with either Canonical or Red Hat, but are there alternatives? Are there ways to do something that works across distributions by using flatpak or the nix package manager? What are your experiences?
Sure. Pick any orchestration solution you like. Ansible, for example. You'd just change the file that is rolled out for that machine, either by changing some central, per-machine file or its ansible file, then tell ansible to update the file remotely and make it run
nixos-rebuild switch
on that machine. A few seconds later the tool is installed. If you replaced vscode with geany vscode would be uninstalled, too.