What I'm curious about is how much control they are willing to give their developers over their workstations. At a previous company they had trouble because the developers needed administrator access to their Windows systems because they needed to install a lot of different software and run many things in administrative mode (server development). It was a constant tension between developers and security. I wonder how it is with Linux, which might have more fine-grained controls and an easier way to install per-user software.
I'm surprised xmonad got a mention. I interpreted it as a window manager that didn't have much traction outside of the Haskell community, particularly with all the configuration being done in Haskell. Perhaps it was just an example of an one of the more strange requests.
That said, I love xmonad. People keep asking me for help with their Gnome desktops and I have to shrug and point out I don't really use Gnome if I can get away with it.
I'm surprised xmonad got a mention. I interpreted it as a window manager that didn't have much traction outside of the Haskell community, particularly with all the configuration being done in Haskell. Perhaps it was just an example of an one of the more strange requests.
That said, I love xmonad. People keep asking me for help with their Gnome desktops and I have to shrug and point out I don't really use Gnome if I can get away with it.