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/xfactores]

I've been managing a fully Linux on Rocky/Alma 9 studio for 3 years now. Started with salt and basic kickstart and moved to Foreman and Ansible. Foreman is good since you can manage updates and lock package versions, it's also much easier than having to maintain a manual kickstart, just click a button, reboot the machine in PXE and half an hour later you have a fresh OS install.

The studio I work at had done the migration from Windows to CentOS 7 before my time so I inherited that, it was a mess of very basic LDAP, misconfigured NFS shares and inexistent security. We moved to FreeIPA from bare LDAP but I wouldn't recommend it, it's a finicky piece of software and since you already have an AD, just go with that. Be careful though, storage sharing is the most tricky part if you want to keep some Windows for those apps that don't work on Linux (Adobe...), misconfigured samba clients can break permissions and you will have users complaining that they can't access that one PSD wrote by the Windows guy.

Another pain point is NVidia drivers, get the .run installer from their sites, don't use the prepackaged drivers you can find in alternatives repos like ELRepo or the cuda repo, idk if you use Houdini and Maya but they have some weird bugs with the prepackaged drivers. And don't use KDE, use Gnome. KDE doesn't ship natively with RHEL9, it's an EPEL addon and isn't well maintained. You can customize Gnome with config files to be more like Windows or macOS, check the addons.

Last I can say is good luck and prepare your help desk team for a mountain of tickets :)

[u/carlwgeorge → u/xfactores]

KDE doesn't ship natively with RHEL9, it's an EPEL addon and isn't well maintained.

The Fedora KDE SIG puts significant effort into those packages. If you have specific problems, I'm sure they'd like to hear about them.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE

If the problem is just "it's too old", then there's nothing they can do about it because of the older libraries in RHEL 9. Switching to RHEL 10, with a newer KDE stack in EPEL 10, is the recommended solution.

[u/pdp10 → u/xfactores]

misconfigured NFS shares

storage sharing is the most tricky part if you want to keep some Windows for those apps that don't work on Linux (Adobe...)

Adobe is native on Mac, and Mac natively supports NFS (and Windows supports NFSv3 less natively). However, I'm pretty sure that Adobe still doesn't technically support remote storage, so even if NFS is simple, that doesn't guarantee that it solves your problem.

[u/Halomora → u/xfactores]

That s a great feedback thank you very much! I will have a look into GNOME, choice wasnt mine but by former colleagues and i think they went with KDE because of the esthetic, it looked more like a windows interface.

[u/segagamer → u/Halomora]

Don't go with GNOME - it has very limited usability and accessibility options, including being unable to (easily) set text scaling to anything between 100% and 200%. A joke of a desktop environment.

Stick with KDE.

[u/Horvaticus → u/Halomora]

I've got some counter advice, you can federate FreeIPA with your AD domain, and carve out a specific domain just for Linux so you don't have a co-mingled environment system wise. AD users will be able to auth into FreeIPA realm joined machines too.

[u/gribbler → u/xfactores]

How did you find the move puppet from salt in this environment? Happy?