Being Forced to Say Goodbye
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In doing so, they needed to reduce inventory, so they gave away the old laptops (sans drives) to their employees. I now own the same laptop (or a very similar one)!
Yeah, IT fleet upgrades are a great way to snag some decent hardware for dirt cheap. My Plex server is running on an old HP EliteDesk that came from a cubicle. The hardware itself is often practically new, because corporate drones rarely do anything intensive enough to actually push the hardware. Just give it a quick spray with some canned air, and pop a new drive in.
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Sadly, that's been my experience for years in IT, at least where I live in the US.
I rarely encounter an IT person who knows what Linux is beyond "a hacker OS" or some arcane system from the 80's that's still running deep in a basement somewhere.
FOSS = janky freeware in their minds. They've usually never even heard of XCP-ng, OpenShift, TrueNAS, Bitwarden, PFSense, or any of the other professionally supported and enterprise-grade open source technologies.
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For sure! 🫶
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Thank you, I might join in spirit heh
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Harsh but fair, edited lol.
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For sure, I'm on it already.
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Oh buddy they’re wiping your laptop that sucks. Figured you were talking like servers and stuff (which is still bad.) if it’s company issued you don’t have a choice, but do they allow personal hardware to be connected? If so I’d just go buy my own thinkpad.
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Good question. I was in the process of testing out DokuWiki for internal documentation, that was really cool.
But probably using Tailscale to phase out our janky ipsec VPN solution. Super high speed and bandwidth aren't a concern at my current place, so Tailscale would be a great solution to fix the current setup we have and make remote work much easier for end users.
I was looking at a Grafana/Prometheus stack for active monitoring and metrics too, which would have been really cool.
I was also talking to the former owner about developing an in-house piece of software that used machine learning and OCR to pull relevant data out of huge construction PDFs, convert it to CSV formatted data, and import that directly into our estimating software, saving our estimators massive amounts of time having to manually parse those documents and input the data line by line, cell by cell.
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Yeah, it really bites. And no, they don't allow anything personal other than phones.
At least I get to use the Thinkpad, even if it is gimped with Windows. They initially weren't even going to allow that, because their company deploys only HP laptops.
But I made a strong and slightly pathetic case to the manager and he relented. Angry that I had to kiss the ring, but right now I need the money, and I really hated their clunky HP laptops.
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Can you run WSL or whatever it’s called? I se to remember some coworkers getting a Linux shell on windows. Of course that still leaves you with the shitty windows UI.
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I know it's rough. Trying to find a job that pays well and isn't deep into proprietary stuff like SQL Server, C# and alike. Sadly this scenario is overwhelmingly the case, and until the crowdfunded and open source scenario get strong (they still aren't) there isn't too much of an option.
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I don't know where you are, but this isn't always enough. If it's your employer's IP it's not yours to license to begin with.
In my situation, it even extends to any hobby projects I work on and I don't think my situation is unusual.
That said, most employers don't care about hobby projects with no earning potential.
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It's incredible how that proprietary software is actually inefficient e-waste. Most FOSS isn't bloated or slow, but proprietary software got the high ground because of contracts and "security", I'm sure.
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That seems like a good idea.
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I feel for you. Here's hoping the new system is clean.
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That's unfortunate. Both for throwing out all of your work and replacing it with an objectively inferior solution with poor track record of long-term sustainability.
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Sadly, this means all my Linux and FOSS implementations I've worked on
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Many years ago I did post mix installs. Because we were subcontract, it was not unusual to install a system for one company, then replace it under the banner of another company, and then rip that out and install another system on behalf of the first company again.
I can think of at least 3 different venues in our CBD that I swapped like that.
What it did was make me real good at ensuring anything I installed was easy to follow and work with afterwards... Cause it was probably going to be me again lol
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Will they even know if they are throwing it all away?
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shutdown: command
