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by Alupis 146 days ago
Nothing in the linux world would forbid something like Group Policy. A commercial distro that targets large-scale enterprise customers could implement something exactly like Active Directory + friends.

Ansible, FreeIPA, and more can be used individually or together to achieve what AD provides. There are large enterprises that are non-windows...

5 comments

My comment above already addresses this.

I'm aware there are large enterprises that are non-Windows. All of them are technology companies. They are well equipped to pay their own developers to compensate for not having Group Policy, and may even be Microsoft competitors who don't want to spend money on them. Ansible being a replacement for Group Policy is very funny. That is like saying Postgres is a replacement for Excel.

Home Depot used to have a large fleet of RHEL machines within the stores. Looks like they've more recently rolled to SuSe.

https://linuxdevices.org/linux-based-pos-rolls-into-home-dep... (2001!)

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-site-selecti...

Not to argue too much against what you're saying but I thought that some EU gov't entities had moved off of Windows a while ago.

I know at least one university that doesn't put Windows on its machines either. While Uni requirements are not the same as "enterprise" requirements, it does feel close-ish.

Having said all this, I am very primed to believe that they have a Group Policy-sized hole in their systems. Just thinking they are doing ... something.

You can do a lot with Ansible but GPOs are unbelievably configurable and you'd need to know lots and lots of registry lore to get close.
Ansible and FreeIPA can’t hold a candle to Active Directory

Ansible has a defined purpose and it is good at what it does

> Nothing in the linux world would forbid something like Group Policy

Except 100 and 1 method of configuring of anything. But not a binary tree because three zealots depend on greping a config into perl2 scripts for some automation.

selinux?