posted in Technology
US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS-based software ecosystem
www.tomshardware.com/software/the-netherlands-is-rolling-alternative-nixos-based-software-ecosystem-after-u-s-sanctions-on-icc-took-microsoft-off-the-table-trial-programs-running-now-first-release-expected-at-end-of-2027Windows is basically a zombie OS at this point, shambling along and eating brains.
Replying to @chahn.chris@piefed.social
Windows as a home user desktop is definitely coasting on momentum, though it is also the OS deployed on most new PCs which keeps it going.
I think the only thing really keeping Microsoft relevant is Active Directory (and Azure by extension) because a lot of organizations are dependent on AD internally, and there still aren’t really any good alternatives that check all the same boxes. You could probably cobble together a working solution for ~90% of it with open source software, but it would be clunky, fragmented and feature-poor compared to an on-prem AD system. It would require a lot more administrative overhead to configure and maintain it, and user management would be a mess.
Replying to @NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
EntraID also seems corporate established. For a modern with system, with zero trust etc, you use EntraID instead of AD now.
Of course, legacy AD systems, if they exist, are also lock-in.
Replying to @Kissaki@feddit.org
EntraID is just a rebranding of Azure AD
Azure AD, the cloud version, still isn’t as feature-complete (or possibly feature-bloated) as the original on-prem AD, which is a big reason large organizations won’t switch away from it.
Replying to @NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
AD is a security nightmare. EntraID requires internet but at least allows zero trust with diverse configuration and importantly without storing or holding session tokens or passwords locally.
For my company, the only blocker is file share, which can be migrated. All our with integration use ldap and can be migrated to openid. Luckily we don’t have more AD integrated stuff.
Replying to @Kissaki@feddit.org
AD is a security nightmare.
True, but so are all of the cloud platforms, so that doesn’t really set it apart. Being legacy tech at this point without a lot of new code being added regularly, most of the weaknesses are pretty well understood.
EntraID requires internet but at least allows zero trust
Yeah I’m not convinced that Microsoft as an entity actually grasps the concept of zero trust. I think they likely have their own internal definition of it, just like they had their own definition of web standards back in the Internet Exploder days.
Look at what happened recently with Edge, where they claimed that storing user credentials in cleartext was “intended behavior”: