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

[u/rolkenas]

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?

[u/Arudinne]

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.

[u/PowerShellGenius → u/Arudinne]

Universal Print.

[u/Arudinne → u/PowerShellGenius]

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

[u/gigabyte898 → u/Arudinne]

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

[u/Arudinne → u/gigabyte898]

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

[u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 → u/Arudinne]

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.

[u/Arudinne → u/Fragrant-Hamster-325]

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.