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What I'm curious about is how much control they are willing to give their developers over their workstations. At a previous company they had trouble because th
by Periodic 14y ago
What I'm curious about is how much control they are willing to give their developers over their workstations. At a previous company they had trouble because the developers needed administrator access to their Windows systems because they needed to install a lot of different software and run many things in administrative mode (server development). It was a constant tension between developers and security. I wonder how it is with Linux, which might have more fine-grained controls and an easier way to install per-user software.
I'm surprised xmonad got a mention. I interpreted it as a window manager that didn't have much traction outside of the Haskell community, particularly with all the configuration being done in Haskell. Perhaps it was just an example of an one of the more strange requests.
That said, I love xmonad. People keep asking me for help with their Gnome desktops and I have to shrug and point out I don't really use Gnome if I can get away with it.
- neild 14y agoDevelopers have root on their workstations. Google doesn't believe in treating developers like the enemy.
- myko 14y agoAs an intern last summer with Google I had my personal Xmonad environment setup and running day 2 in the office. So yeah, Google gives their developers plenty of control over their workstations :) And Xmonad rocks for productivity.
- mhitza 14y agoWhere you using a multimonitor setup or just a single big monitor? I found xmonad not so pleasant in multimonitor setup where it saw each monitor as a separate workspace.
- daave 14y agoI've been using XMonad in a dual-monitor setup since I started working at Google in January... haven't had any problems with it. My general (rough) impression from walking around the New York office is that about one fifth of engineers here are using XMonad.
- jrockway 14y agoReally? I have not seen one other person that uses it. I haven't even heard it discussed, and I asked around a lot when I started. I'm surprised we have never discussed this, actually :)
- AncientPC 14y agoI hated that concept too when I first switched to Xmonad, but after a few months I've come to appreciate that behavior. It allows me to keep one screen static while working on another. This allows me to dedicate a workspace to communication (email, IM, etc), server, development, documentation, etc and move among them easily.
- rmATinnovafy 14y agoI've looking for that feature for a while. I'm sold. I have about a thousand different windows opened at the same time.
- adgar 14y agoLurking along this thread (google engineer), this is exactly what I want for my multi monitor setup! Chrome on one screen, everything else on another, programmable WM to make organizing that other screen natural. I don't know too much about the Linux desktop scene, and I'm plenty productive as-is, so I didn't even bother looking. Thanks!
- jmillikin 14y ago(I work at Google) A few employees in particularly security-sensitive positions don't have full root, and have to use "sudo" with a whitelist of commands, allowed packages, and so on. It's fairly easy to get packages added to the whitelist, by filing a request with the security team. Users who need to run insecure operating systems, or need to install arbitrary packages, use heavily sandboxed VMs. Two members of my current team used xmonad before I got here, and I've helped two more to convert. I anticipate there will be more conversions after Precise comes along and forces everyone off GNOME 2. To my knowledge, none of them know anything about Haskell.
- keithpeter 14y agoI am fascinated by the preference for Xmonad as an alternative to Unity/Gnome Shell. Would Gnome 2 -> XFCE or Gnome 2 -> Gnome Classic not make more sense? Or is it more along the lines of: we have to change anyway so lets have a look at a workflow that really fits how we work? I say this as a humble end user who has gone dwm/dmenu -> Unity with 12.04
- jmillikin 14y agoGNOME Classic is really just a thin skin over GNOME 3; it doesn't have any of the useful features that the GNOME team removed from their software. XFCE and KDE just aren't very popular in my area, though I don't know why. I have seen people discuss moving to KDE on internal mailing lists, so there is some interest elsewhere in the company. The two people I helped convert have, to my knowledge, not bothered with customising xmonad. They just copied my config, changed a keybinding or two, and then left it alone.
- keithpeter 14y agoGreat, I'm just getting my head around people missing features in Gnome 2 so instead going to a 'bare backed' window manager like Xmonad.
- jmillikin 14y ago
- sliverstorm 14y agoeasier way to install per-user software. Not "easy", but a real, functional option- compile from source in your home folder, targeting ~/bin, ~/lib, etc. The onus is entirely on the user, of course.
- krzyk 14y agoAt my company almost everyone uses Windows (it's the official supported sytem) but I installed Linux on my box and no one had issues with this (I didn't ask for any permission, I just did it - as long as I do my work there shouldn't be any issues). We have some internal page for people using alternative OSes (Linux and MacOs, didn't see any other) and there is some kind of support with the availability of an VM image with all the office software that we use. I really love that my company supports Windows only, because if they would support Linux it would mean that they would force me to use packages that I don't want to or take away my root access.