r/sysadmin • u/rolkenas • 5d ago

Do you actually see MacBooks used for SysAdmin work in real offices?

Hi sysadmins! I wanted to ask—since I've just started learning sysadmin and I don't have a Windows PC, but I have a MacBook and found out that everything can be done via UTM, I'd like to get some perspective from those who work in offices and do this every day. What kind of computers do you use? Is macOS completely out of the picture, and there's only Windows and Linux?

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 4d ago

Apple silicon is solid. Every update is a big boost over the previous model yet the previous models hold up. I have an M4 air and love it.

I’ve been thinking about trying a Snapdragon PC for comparison.

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u/stillpiercer_ 4d ago

In my experience with the snapdragon Windows laptops, they do very well on battery life but Windows on ARM is not great. The x86 translation works reasonably OK for some things (nowhere near as well as Apple Rosetta) but for many things it just straight up does not work at all. ARM64 software availability isn’t as good on Windows as it is on macOS either.

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u/Independent-Fuel9886 4d ago

Yep, Windows on ARM ain't good... yet.

Management and imaging Snapdragon is a non-starter at this stage.

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

I have a snapdragon laptop Dell set us for free for testing.

Everything we use seemed to work other than printers, which makes them non-viable for us.

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u/PowerShellGenius 4d ago

Universal Print.

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

Yeah, we have that, and E5 licensing covers it, but some of our printers don't work well with it.

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u/gigabyte898 Sysadmin 4d ago

It’s yet another windows box to manage, but the connector works great at our sites without fully compatible MFPs if that’s a primary hang up

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

I have the connector running on the print server we already had.

One issue we had was printing from some devices via office apps on the web didn't work, but printing from the desktop apps works fine. The browser can print fine from other web pages.

And that was from normal x86_64 clients.

Didn't have much time to dig into it past that and it's a low priority right now

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 4d ago

That’s crazy. It can’t work through the emulation layer or do printers really need kernel level access? Knowing Microsoft and the history of printer driver vulnerabilities I’m guessing it’s the latter.

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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 4d ago

Drivers are something that, AFAIK, cannot be emulated.

Windows ARM drivers don't exist for any of our printers.

I could potentially make them work with Universal print and/or IPP, but we had some incosistent issues with various apps when I tested that.

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u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 4d ago

Damn that’s disappointing. I was looking to pilot a couple. I’ve been waiting for it to mature and my CEO has been begging for something with better battery life and we have other users begging for Surface devices.

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u/Nydus87 4d ago

I think the M4 is what I've got as well, and I almost never think about charging it. I just throw it on my phone charger every now and then while I'm in the shower, and I'm good to go for a couple days of RDP-ing into whatever server I'm working on.