If you can, get a Linux work machine. In lue of that get a Mac.

If you can’t do either, buckle up cause it’s gonna get real bumpy

Odds are security is not able to fight this fight.

The MSA with Microsoft will say something along the lines of data will not leave the corporate boundary. And that will be sufficient - because Microsoft has assumed the risk.

I or others can go into more detail, but I’m guessing you do not want a super in depth answer?

One of the major cloud providers (aka renting a chunk of a data center) has a outage in the us-east-1 region. Because of internal dependencies on us-east-1, when that AWS region (aka data center) has problems it impacts service’s across all AWS regions. To end users, suddenly web sites will act strange, crash, or just not work as elements of their backend are having problems. Due to the raw size of AWS, when something like this happens vast swaths of the web will break.

For highly technical users containers are going to do everything we need.

For non technical users who need separation, profiles are a standard known framework.

Depends on seat count. But even a “small” (the smallest bucket of seats is 500) on prem install of data center/confluence can be in 6 figures…

Hell. I’ll echo that but for senor operations types. Your who im looking for if you can function in 3+ different operating systems, understand (and can implement) dnssec, and design gitops workflows. Bonus points if you can explain SMTP to me.

Only allowed to use if your hostname is Epsilon3. And instead of systemd you get TheGreatMachine.

I get it. But the moment we invoke RAID, or ZFS, we are outside what standard consumers will ever interact with, and therefore into business use cases. Remember, even simple homelab use cases involving docker are well past what the bulk of the world understands.

There is an enterprise storage shelf (aka a bunch of drives that hooks up to a server) made by Dell which is 1.2 PB (yes petabytes). So there is a use, but it’s not for consumers.

The requirement for everything to have a ground wire is fairly new in the scheme of home construction. Depending on when the house was built, and depending on if everything up to now was done to code, would impact if it’s there.

Not op but I’ll do stuff from time to time that is well below my pay grade. Mind management understands that the pay difference and that I’m not doing my normal responsibilities if I’m helping out…

See I just like LMDE. Everything works without fiddling (I want my OS to be boring). And if I feel spicy - backports.

Ask your local sys admin/DevOps nerd what they’re doing. The self hosted stacks are easy to maintain if you do it for a living and most of us hand out access to our friends/family.

I’m a senior IT type. My work laptop is Debian.

We like good pastries, coffee, good booze and feeling appreciated. Go make friends with the senior IT types and the help desk manager. Trust me it’s with it.

Also…

1. everything is changeable. But not everything should be changed.
2. There will come a time when you need to interact with the command line. This is expected, and no you did not do something wrong.
3. Have fun.

Oh if your looking for a distro? Mint is a great entry point (and even can support crusty old graybeards as well).

Fair. And short of someone publishing a study I doubt we will ever know what the best entry point is. So, advocate the atomic distros, I’ll advocate the crusty old dinosaur that moves (slightly) faster then molasses. And someone else reading this thread can recommend one of the rolling distros. At the end of the day to me the importance bit is that someone is interested in Linux as a whole.

Also a lot harder to wrap your head around atomic distros when your first playing with Linux. Windows > a traditional distro (even arch) is a lot more similar then making the switch to an immutable distro.

And to be clear. I’m not going to say Debian is not without it’s flaws. It is the system you choose if all you care about is stability. Case in point, I work with Linux day in and day out for my job, the absolute last thing I want to do is tinker with my laptop when I’m not at work - so I picked Debian. For me, the absolute stability is the most important thing - for others the fact that software can come preconfigured or is just old will be deal breakers.

As for Ubuntu vs Debian - ultimately they are similar. However Ubuntu has made some (IMO) choices I dislike (eg snaps).

It’s a different family then what you have been playing with, but if you want “just works and not fancy” - Debian.

It won’t have the latest and greatest software (security patches sure but nothing else). You trade that for stability.

While I knew some of this, I will happily say I did not know it all. Thank you for taking the time to do this level of info dump.