Did those 500 users also happen to be the ones that weren’t adequately supported because they were seen as problem children?

If my org doesn’t give me a supported way to do absolutely necessary thing X, then I’ll find my own way to do it.

As I said they took up about 50% of the second line support capacity for the entire organisation. So yes they were properly supported, unless you want a dedicated tech to hold the hand of every exec, dev and bioinformatician.

Or the technical infrastructure doesn’t support them well. Or the support team doesn’t know MacOS or Linux, so it becomes a lot harder to provide support. There could be many reasons.

No, they're just really difficult to support.

MS makes it very easy to secure and admin at massive scale. You can roll out policies and updates to hundreds of thousands of machines with like 1-2 admins, and the other 8 IT people manage 200 Linux and Mac machines.

They also make it really easy to screw things up. I work at Microsoft, and a few weeks ago they rolled out a botched group policy change for our whole org that somehow deleted all O365 apps and Docker from most people’s machines. The best part is you’d try to launch, say, Excel and you’d get an error about it being removed for being possibly malicious.

Oh, so it's not the users at all, it's that you have tools to manage Windows and didn't set up tools to manage anything else even though they exist; like a Linux admin complaining that Windows is unmanageable because ansible doesn't work well on it.

You're maliciously misunderstanding. The tools available to manage Windows are simply either much, much better, or much better value.

And everything just works out of the box with like... 3 lines of PowerShell.

You can replicate some of it with Ansible, sticky tape and a few spare weeks, but it's not the same at all.

I'm actually Linux admin, grew up with open source and spent my career serving pages and automating myself out of a job. I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but for enterprise use they are _next fucking level_.

While it is entirely possible the problem here is those execs, devs and bioinformaticians. There do seem to be many other common factors than the macs here.

Maybe they all need nonstandard software? God forbid, maybe they need administration permissions, but the org doesn’t want to give it to them, so they end up calling in every other day to get something unlocked (I know that’d be true for me).

Maybe it’s the problem solving skills of the IT team when it comes to mac, so people keep coming back with the same issues (good ones are Outlook/Teams being permanently broken, or VPN not connecting).

On the whole, I’d steer away from any explanation that would require all 500 mac users to be idiots.

This seems like a clear case of selection bias. People with Linux and Mac are probably devs and technical people who will obviously utilize a much broader range of functionality of their machines and thus encounter more edge cases.

Ye clear selection bias. Most users can't describe a problem in enough detail to get to "2nd line" support in the first place.

You more or less need to be a dev-ish person to prove IT is at fault. The lusers have to live with the unplug the computer and reboot workarounds.

A few years ago, there was a video game developer who pointed out the disproportionate number of bug reports that came from their Linux players, and how grateful they were for it. The majority of the bugs reported by Linux users were not Linux-specific, and frequently had detailed descriptions of expected via observed behavior, exact steps to reproduce, core dumps, etc. Because the bug reports were coming from a group who is used to making effective bug reports, they could be used more effectively.

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28978086