Anyone survived a Windows to Linux user workstations migration?

[u/Halomora]

Hey fellow sys admin,

I work at a VFX/animation studio (~400 users).

We're kicking off a project to migrate our artist workstations from Windows 10/11 VDIs to Linux. Flavor is pretty much locked it ll be Rocky Linux 9 with KDE.

I am curious if there's anyone here who's been through a similar workstation migration to linux?

What Linux flavor, did you end up on, and would you pick the same again?

How did you handle what GPOs used to give you?

For the Base OS deployment/imaging, did you use Kickstart + Puppet/Ansible, or something else?

Anything that looked easy on paper and turned into a one big pile of {Jurassic_Park}?

Tools that made your life easier along the way?

I am looking for any war stories, good or bad!

Thank you!

[u/jimicus]

I've worked for a couple of companies that made a Linux GUI available to people with varying levels of technical expertise. Generally with great success.

In very general terms, they didn't try to treat it like Windows.

By which I mean they didn't start out with a general purpose operating system that can do more-or-less anything then try and put guardrails in place with GPO.

Instead, they started out with a system that had literally nothing installed and nothing enabled - then they installed and enabled what people needed to do their job.

No more, no less.

It makes for a pretty basic, bare-bones desktop experience - but it also means there aren't a great many avenues open to people to mess up their own computer. And if everyone has clear workflows based around a small, well-defined set of tools, it's not too difficult.

[u/Halomora → u/jimicus]

Nice! Thank you for sharing, that s pretty much the approach i want to follow honestly, try to lock everything possible and incrementaly opens more if there's a clear need. The plan is also to audit our actual GPOs and see which one we need accross OS and which one we can remove too.

[u/jimicus → u/Halomora]

You’re thinking backwards.

Nobody ever started with a full install of KDE with all the bells and whistles. They started with the base DE package and nothing else. No Kde-extras-games.rpm, no Kde-control-panel.rpm, no Kde-backgrounds.rpm no Kde-extra-icons.rpm.

Contrast with Windows which just includes everything and you can’t easily remove it; you have to accept GPOs that block instead.

Didn’t matter if it was Gnome or KDE; the end user wasn’t seeing the control panel anyway.

[u/LesbianDykeEtc → u/jimicus]

Instead, they started out with a system that had literally nothing installed and nothing enabled - then they installed and enabled what people needed to do their job.

No more, no less.

This is generally how I prefer to approach it, but obviously ymmv. Building an environment for VFX artists is wildly different from building an environment for developers, "normal" office users, etc.

[u/jimicus → u/LesbianDykeEtc]

That was my only concern - would it work for VFX artists?

My thinking - and it's based purely on hunch as opposed to experience of this particular industry - is you might be surprised. Yes, a studio is chock full of creatives who can and will do things however they think looks best - but their tooling and workflow is (probably) ruthlessly optimised for efficiency and teamwork. The idea of a flighty artist who will demand their preferred way of working, their preferred tools and to Hell with the rest of the team doesn't really work in a professional environment.

[u/LesbianDykeEtc → u/jimicus]

Given that OP is looking at Rocky, they're probably using Blackmagic products (iirc, they explicitly target RHEL and a couple other enterprise-grade distros?). If that's the case, their primary workflows will be unchanged, and KDE is dead simple to use.

Obviously we don't know what their artists need on the day-to-day, but a full-fat distro like Rocky can probably handle it. Hell, most everything runs in the browser nowadays anyway.

[u/jimicus → u/LesbianDykeEtc]

The places I’ve seen, the desktop environment is almost irrelevant because virtually none of the fancy customisation features offered by that environment are made available.