The "IT guy" there and all the other (non IT) office staff asked me what this is and how they could get it. I had to do a full 15 minutes of explanations about Ubuntu. You cannot imagine the looks after I told them it is free.
But I don't like the culture that follows it around.
I like Ubuntu and see it as a much more positive model and a more extensible, cheaper system. However we have some problems to contend with...
Here's how it works where I work (SME - 100 people - UK - Financial sector):
Show a user Ubuntu - "ooh that's really nice - feels better than windows".
Show a dev/architect Ubuntu - "yeah we already use it at home for everything and we run a few VMs without letting operations know - want me to friend you on bitbucket?"
User approaches operations for a test machine - "NO!" and a load of FUD about how Linux is cancer and Microsoft is Jesus' sandals and "I'll replace you with a very small powershell script (if I can get the signing right)".
Dev/architect approaches operations for a test machine - "NO!" then silence with no attempt to get into a discussion.
Any discussion raised ends up with the "we're a microsoft shop and that's not going to change".
This is the same company which runs everything on ESX which is Linux underneath, has Linux-based virtual firewall and load balancer appliances, uses Linux-based Android phones, Unix-based iOS devices everywhere and ironically runs it's entire phone system on Linux.
At the other extreme, we have to run memcached on windows otherwise ops will get all antsy.
Clueless monocultural operations teams that want to protect their worth are who are causing serious problems.
We need some marketing tied to "you dont need an ops team anymore" or "cheaper, more efficient ops teams are possible with Linux" (which they are) and you will get somewhere.
This is the THIRD place I've seen this now so it's rife.
The clueless idiot who managed the team kept on resurrecting benchmarks from the 90's on how Windows was better for serving static content. When it finally became obvious that all the problems were due to their technical choices, they botched two attempts to migrate the servers to Linux. They configured Apache in such a way it kept on allocating memory until the machines crashed every 25 hours or so. I won't attribute that to malice. They were really incompetent and misconfiguring a web server in this way required more brainpower than they had.
We eventually fired him and most of his minions. They now work at a Microsoft partner.
I started with Ubuntu, but the updates always break on me. So now I'm giving a Debian a go. I'm amazed how much like Ubuntu 8.04-9.10 it is--the Gnome 2 desktop is nice and simple. That's unfortunately an option Canonical has taken away from its distro.
Seems surprising that the IT guy didn't know about it though, can't be many people in the IT world (even dyed in the wool Windows guys) that haven't heard of Ubuntu.
I'm also familiar with a situation at many smaller banks where their IT person is the youngest of the VPs. Of course they use external IT services and audits, but for day to day IT problems you go to the VP of whatever first.