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/frzen]

What remote access application are you using?

will your EDR have any tools to enforce configs / compliance or is that something you're looking to just set, or set and monitor, or set and monitor and remediate?

It's a different use case to you but I've been playing with NixOS and doing health checks remotely by having a central server deploying with --target-host so your desired state is basically constantly being monitored / pushed

has a billion edge cases for how users can break it but for me it's more about configuration drift etc and obviously it wouldn't work if you've settled on rocky but I wouldn't shrug at using nix itself for some part of this

[u/Halomora → u/frzen]

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