It can check if people are typing or using the mouse.

It’s also possible to use the camera of a notebook to track if a person is present and looking at the screen or not.

Any company using that shit is the kind that uses “bums of seats” rather than actual deliverables as a measure of performance, which means they’re also the kind of place were unpaid overtime is the norm and, if in dev, things like projects often ending up in a death march stage - such places are stupidly inneficient and badly managed with a disfunctional work culture.

Avoid such companies like the plague - you’ll be luck if the worst that happens is insane work hours.

Never, ever, EVER use your personal equipment for work.

There are a ton of legal reasons for that, not just around who owns the Copyright of work done on that machine as well as licensing of the software running in it (most commercial software has different licensing conditions for personal and commercial use) but also because if there’s some kind of legal case against that company your equipment might very well be confiscated as part of an investigation.

Also, more in general, if you have personal practices which are legally dubious or often frowned upon (piracy, porn) you don’t do it in the same machine where you’re doing your professional work, definitelly not on a work machine but even in your own machine it’s risky (see the point above about how your machine might end up confiscated and examined by the authorities if the company is investigated). The principle of “you don’t shit were you eat” applies here.

Even for your own company, it’s best to have the company stuff separate from personal stuff.

Beyond that, it’s also a very good idea in terms of having a good work-life balance to separate the personal from the professional: ideally you keep a very strong separation between work and not-work, at all levels, from work time and outside-work time to work/personal machine and work/personal phone - it helps make clear both for yourself and, even more importantly, others, that there is no work outside work, which reduces the chances of management doing things like call you on weekends or evenings with questions and makes it easier for them to accept when they try it and you say “I’m not at work now, so I’ll pick this up first thing when I’m back at work” - the cleaner and harder the split the less room there is for the “barely in control, almost 100% reactive” kind of manager to sneak work stuff into your personal-time.

It very much depends on what you’re developing for.

Back when I did server-side development (which almost invariably is targetting Linux servers), having Linux as my dev environment was much better if only because I could run parts (or even all) of our server code directly in my machine configured as a Dev Environment.

However, for example, for Game Dev running Linux is much more of a problem because some tools are for Windows and you have to jump through hoops to make it run in Linux, if at all.

If you’re doing development on internal frontend systems for use by the Business side of a non-Tech company, then Windows is almost certainly the best dev OS because the software is meant to run in Windows machines (as that’s what the Business runs, unless we’re talking about creative companies, in which case it will be Mac) so the very same reasons why Linux is better for server dev apply here for Windows - it way more straightforward to develop in a machine where you can directly test at least parts of the code within the OS it will be running in.

Yeah, you can run virtual machines or deploy to a dev server, but that just adds extra steps and hence extra overhead for frequently done things like running small snippets of code whilst developing just to check it’s working as expected.

Then there’s the whole big company vs small company side of things: big companies have dedicated IT Support people and those will naturally try to standardize things for the obvious reason that it’s way more effective (same thing in dev, by the way, good Technical Architects try to keep the number of programming languages used low because its generally more efficient to have libraries, frameworks, maintenance and hiring practices around a smaller number of languages than it is to do it for many languages) which in turn means that in large companies “everybody gets the same” is an almost unassailable policy except for top-level management.

I’ve worked in all sizes of companies, in various industries and 3 different European countries.

In my experience it very much depends on the industry the company in, the division one is working in and the size of the company.

Engineering types in an Engineering/Tech company using Linux isn’t at all unusual in smaller and mid-sized companies. Sales types or accounting, definitelly are using Window. Creatives tend to use Macs, mainly because the Adobe suite runs perfectly in it and the hardware is superior to PC hardware - designer types almost literally salivate at things like 4K monitors.

Real startups (so, not mature Tech companies that try and still be startups) will definitelly have their devs running whatever they want, whist for example big financial institutions will have everybody on Windows, except perhaps top-level management if they’re quirky and prefer Mac for some reason or other.

Then to this add that the kind of professional who not only prefers Linux but can actually say “bye, bye” if they don’t get it is almost certainly be a pretty senior Techie (say, a Senior Designer Developer) and even now those are pretty hard to find for a permanent employment position (you can’t replace those with AI or outsourcing, not even close, and in the path to such seniority many devs who keep on progressing eventually step into management instead of staying on the Technical career track) - outside a large company (were the hiring manager doesn’t have the pull to make it happen), it a pretty good idea to let them use whatever OS they want in their work machine, even if it has to be with the proviso that they won’t be getting any support for it from the IT Support group (which, trust me, they will be fine with).

If a hiring manager has the pull for it and there are no regulatory reasons to make it be otherwise, it’s pretty dumb not to let a rare resource like a really senior dev use whatever the fuck they want on their work PC if that’s going to allow you hire/keep that person.

Yeah, even cheap microcontrollers nowadays with support for clock functionality have an ultra low power mode were the only thing running is the clock crystal and the clock functionality which uses so little power that it can run for years from such a button battery.

The thing could do the same as my stupidly cheap alarm clock that has some batteries as power backup and just keep on counting time without displaying whilst mains power is down so that when mains power comes back up it still has the right time.

The extra $1 for the hardware needed for it is hardly going to matter next to the overal cost of anything but a stupidly cheap microwave.

I have a stupidly cheap microwave which I bought a few years ago (because I moved homes and the last one, a rental, included a microwave) and it has no clock.

In fact, it doesn’t even have the simplest of displays - the entire user interface is one analog rotary control for power and another for microwaving time - the latter rotating back by itself at a fixed speed - plus a bell that dings when the second control reaches the zero position.

If I want to know how long till a microwaving operation is finished I just look at the position of the second rotary control.

Sometimes simpler is better.

Try Lutris or Heroic Launcher as those two wrap around Wine (and everything else needed to run Windows games in Linux, such as DXVK) and manage the whole process for you, with only a few games which might need tweaking the config to run (and the fraction of games like that is no worse there than it is in Steam).

I use both Steam and Lutris and in my experience Steam is not at all a good launcher for anything other than games from the Steam store, mainly because it is less configurable and because it doesn’t directly expose the tools you need to use to fix those few games that won’t just run and limits the launch options you can tweak, whilst Lutris follows the Unofficial Open Source Credo of pretty much making it possible to configure everything (though Lutris specifically defaults to the best configuration for each game, but it definitelly gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself with)

Steam is very popular because of the Steam Store market dominance so tons of people swear by it (never having used anything else), but it’s not actually the greatest option for anything but steam games and even for those, sometimes it’s worse that getting the same game from GoG and using Lutris or Heroic, mainly because the DRM in the non-GoG version of some games interferes with running them in Linux.

Don’t use Wine directly, just use launcher UIs, such as Steam for Steam store games and Heroic Launcher or Lutris for games not from the Steam store.

You do need Wine installed, but if you use launchers you don’t actually need to figure Wine out or manage it to install and run the vast majority of games unless you’re doing unusual stuff like running pirated games.

Shit peddler wants people to stop calling what he peddles “shit”.