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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I am a sysadmin and Group Policy is the entire moat Microsoft has. Linux has nothing like it, and it probably can't because it requires a level of top down authority over a platform's design and implementation that would be hard in the Linux space.

Maybe something like systemd could do something similar which defined policy over all the components they've taken over, but a distro doing it would be pointless, we're not a Linux shop and have at least three different Linux distros in service.

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Nothing in the linux world would forbid something like Group Policy. A commercial distro that targets large-scale enterprise customers could implement something exactly like Active Directory + friends.

Ansible, FreeIPA, and more can be used individually or together to achieve what AD provides. There are large enterprises that are non-windows...

My comment above already addresses this.

I'm aware there are large enterprises that are non-Windows. All of them are technology companies. They are well equipped to pay their own developers to compensate for not having Group Policy, and may even be Microsoft competitors who don't want to spend money on them. Ansible being a replacement for Group Policy is very funny. That is like saying Postgres is a replacement for Excel.

Not to argue too much against what you're saying but I thought that some EU gov't entities had moved off of Windows a while ago.

I know at least one university that doesn't put Windows on its machines either. While Uni requirements are not the same as "enterprise" requirements, it does feel close-ish.

Having said all this, I am very primed to believe that they have a Group Policy-sized hole in their systems. Just thinking they are doing ... something.

Home Depot used to have a large fleet of RHEL machines within the stores. Looks like they've more recently rolled to SuSe.

https://linuxdevices.org/linux-based-pos-rolls-into-home-dep... (2001!)

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-site-selecti...

Ansible and FreeIPA can’t hold a candle to Active Directory

Ansible has a defined purpose and it is good at what it does

> Nothing in the linux world would forbid something like Group Policy

Except 100 and 1 method of configuring of anything. But not a binary tree because three zealots depend on greping a config into perl2 scripts for some automation.

You can do a lot with Ansible but GPOs are unbelievably configurable and you'd need to know lots and lots of registry lore to get close.

selinux?

The competitor of Group Policy is not really an implementation of that running on Linux clients. It's that the client doesn't need that level of management because 99.5% of your users only use cloud based services. Microsoft know that, which is why they are keen for everyone to use their cloud ecosystem, but that's not a monopoly today in the way windows was.

Of course Linux clients in your network can be controlled by group policy. You just need to roll out a enterprise-grade distribution like red hat.

See for example:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...

https://documentation.ubuntu.com/adsys/latest/how-to/use-gpo...

The present future of top down Linux management is NixOS. Who knows what the eventual future will be. ;)

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