Ricoh GRiii

Sooo, Ricoh GRiii is actually amazing. I barely use my phone for photos anymore.

I hope no one tries to push GPO-like stuff on Linux. I get where you are coming from, but for example Puppet will give you a lot more power and and flexibility. There is no registry. ”Everything is a file” is actually true, you just manage a bunch of config files instead.

As for AD, you have FreeIPA as the major contender. It works. You can also just join your Linux clients to your AD. Kerberos works just as expected.

(RedHat actually tried pushing management of Gnome via FreeIPA á la GPO. It sucks, because the desktop environment is just a tiny part of what you might want to manage, so suddenly you need to have both that bullshit and your normal configuration management tool.)

It’s getting there, slowly.

• Clevis can do network and TPM pinned disk decryption.
• With Linux UKIs you can do self signed secure boot, we still need the mechanisms for central signing. This would actually be better that windows, you control your own PKI and Microsoft can’t sign garbage your machines boot.
• Logs is a somewhat bogus argument - log falsification on Windows has been done too. But linux is rather unprotected in comparison.

But the biggest issue is the mentality of ”I own my computer”. Sure, you own your private machine, but your company owns the computer you use for work and the data on it and has an interest in protecting that data from you. That particular threat model is hard to communicate, as Linux users normally don’t think of themselves as a threat vector.

This is the one thing holding open source back, and the thing Linux users keep pissing on without understanding it.

The CTOs inept nephew can manage your fleet of windows machines and you get all the checkbox security you need for compliance (and some real security):

• Centrally managed
• Logs that are fairly hard to manipulate
• SecureBoot + Bitlocker

That same feature set on Linux will cost you a ton of money in skilled staff if you want to check the same compliance checkboxes. (As for real security, who cares, no one is doing that anyway)

Kind regards: someone who has managed Linux fleets.