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Comment by swarnie | Hacker News Reader

In your world i should switch my modest 1000 seats over to Linux desktops?

I'm not sure how i'm going to explain the productivity loss and retraining costs to the board if im honest.

Plus, CrowdStrike runs on Linux as well. _This time_ they only crashed Windows devices, but there's no guarantee that switching to Linux would prevent any of it.

You can switch away from CrowdStrike but I doubt you'll be able to convince whoever mandated CS to be installed to not install an alternative that carries exactly the same risks.

>CrowdStrike runs on Linux as well. _This time_ they only crashed Windows devices, but there's no guarantee that switching to Linux would prevent any of it.

In fact there was a recent CrowdStrike-related crash in RHEL:

https://old.reddit.com/r/crowdstrike/comments/1cluxzz/crowds...

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7068083

At least on Linux it runs on eBPF sniffing so the chances of fudging something are lower. There are some supported Linux distributions where they also have a kernel module and there might a higher chance of that exploding.

No you should switch over to Chromeos, iPads, ... anything but Microsoft.

Crowdstrike only exists because Windows and other Microsoft products are so insecure their default configuration.

There's nothing special about Windows beyond the fact that you can run arbitrary executable files. The problem could just as easily have happened for Linux or iOS/Mac and in fact it has. ChromeOS kind of works if you want to run a web application that's hosted on some web server... but it's not appropriate for running programs where a dumb browser doesn't suffice.

What defaults would those be, and how would you change them?

I'm not in IT anymore and we run 100% macs, so serious question here: isn't nearly everything a webapp nowadays? Every "non dev" thing that I have to do for work happens in my browser or an electron app. I guess maybe MS Office apps may be the biggest hitch? We use Google Workspace and that's all in browser.

Not at all. "Industry", think: manufacturing is still big on desktop applications.

Shouldn't be too hard to bundle them together with qemu, or some other vm solution.

Legacy apps are quite common. I have recently been doing IT for State Farm Insurance.

Every State Farm insurance office in the country is still using a DOS App from the 1980's to run their office.

I'm interested what these DOS applications are running on. Is it virtualised or a real physical machine?

There are actually web versions of the office suite now.

It's horrible to use though. Google's suite is somewhat better than MSFT's web one, but it still is weak compared to any established desktop office suite, even libreoffice.

I've found it alright to be honest. I'd like to use libre office but the incompatibilities with .docx make it too annoying. Finally I can easily work with .docx on Linux, thanks to the web version :)

It's only good for viewing and simplistic editing. More complex stuff ends up being unavailable on the web version very often.

None of my enterprise ERP/PLM/CRM systems run on Mac Server OS

Your 1000 seats crashing won't prevent airplanes from landing.

These things should have gone from mainframes of yore to various unix systems, ideally a mix of different unix systems in hot failover.

Without running uncontrolled "agent" software of course.

Enjoy the circus then!

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