If I can find a good MDM solution for Linux hardware and software, I'll let the employees at my startup use Linux too.
I get a sense that corporate MDM is all that's holding Linux back.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/fundamentals/su...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/user-help/enrol...
You can't even touch fintech unless your engineers work on MDM'd devices.
You can't trust every single employee to always keep their machine up to date or be on the up and up. Statistically speaking, you'll need it eventually.
Using Linux not making people automagically smarter and setting simple passwords or not enabling disk encryption - that kind of stuff I can easily imagine to happen without external curation.
At best I could run something like osquery that sends reports to my sys-net VM that forwards them to to an interested IT group at a set interval, but no one has actually implemented this as I am always enough of an edge case that they can file a special exception for me.
Some fintech orgs do get by with Linux users just using osquery reporting to a central monitoring panel like Kibana or Kolide that can send automated alerts to those not complying.
Linux is just a tool. Yes, just another tool.
I've personally seen multiple, not even single digits of persons, who store they ssh private keys unprotected, not using Full Disk Encryption and so on - most of them even have no idea that booting with `init=/bin/bash` will open their system. Those are average Joe and needs curation.
Industry need to the way to ensure on such things => industry created MDM.
Actually it's finally a sign, someone starts interested in bringing Linux To Desktop. I'm waiting for telemetry to be added - that will assure me of the interest further of Linux as a viable Product, not just concept.
But I think your point is sound. Our totally not monopolistic tech giant friends would never dream of colluding to make mobile device management proprietary. To lose hold of MDM would unravel too much. and iStuff doesn't play nice w/ Linux. If there were a decent way to get Messages and SMS on a desktop Linux OS I would be there today.