> Having never worked at a place the size of Google, I'm surprised that their IT team directly manages 100,000 machines. In my (apparently naive) mind, if you'r

> Having never worked at a place the size of Google, I'm surprised that their IT team directly manages 100,000 machines. In my (apparently naive) mind, if you're smart enough to work at Google, you're smart enough to manage your own OS. Smart isn't really a key point here. You can be smart and make choices that solve your immediate needs but may not be good for the company in the long run. The distro provides for some standardization and baseline in among other variance. > Is it a security thing? Yes, one of the forms of standardization are audit solutions that keep track of all kinds of data about the machines. In the time I worked there, I once received outreach because a service I had started on the machine had retained an outgoing port to a third party service provider for an extended period of time. I explained what it was, and I did not get in trouble, but I also shut it down. There are many other forms of audit systems. > Are Googlers not allowed to directly control their own computers? It depends on your role, but many roles have root on their machines. You can of course do just about anything from there, however some things may get undone by periodic scripts if they're defensive (e.g. removal of certain software), or in other cases trigger some kind of outreach as described above. For certain other policies, you may need to file a bug with a business justification to request specific policies - you can also do this for entire teams if it applies to their work.