I work in IT, but I don't work in desktop IT, so I don't have any special rights to do anything on my own personal work computer. It's just as locked down as anybody else's. I can sudo to root on our servers, but I can't change my desktop wallpaper. Recently, corporate decided to hide Desktop in Quick Access, so I can't save to my desktop without going to c:\users\mike\Desktop. Plus, it's only hidden, not removed, so it's technically there and can't be added back. ARGGGG!
@mike
Our desktop support employs similar draconian measures. I have a desktop at my desk. I do ALL of my work on my personal laptop and hop into the desktop to get it on the company network.
@mike I feel your pain here. The only saving grace for me is the ability to ruin VMs on my corp laptop. So I have a VM loaded up with the tools I need to administer various environments I work.
@mike My workplace uses a product named Beyond Trust to manage our desktop computer privileges. It lets us run programs as Administrator without being local administrators on our computers.
However, the only way to use it is by right-clicking programs with the mouse. It can't be used from the command line at all. There's no sudo equivalent, and it doesn't support Start-Process -Verb RunAs in PowerShell. 😞
@dHeinemann That would be interesting. As far as I know we don't have anything like that. I get around a lot of it by having WSL installed and installing things I want/need there. I spend the lion's share of my time in a terminal anyway, so the desktop is pretty superfluous. Still, I would like to be able to remove that Adobe Reader icon on my desktop that I just can't get rid of.
@fedops We have a BYOD policy, but only for mobile devices, not for PCs. I might actually consider it if we had one for PCs just to avoid the tiny annoyances.
@mike former colleague just used an iPad for everything. He was only using office applications and web stuff anyway and for that it worked well enough with one of those keyboard covers.
@fedops I could almost get away with that too. I need the web, I need basic office stuff (Libre works perfectly for my needs), and I need a terminal. The last one is where things tend to fall down a bit. There's stuff like Termux out there, but I've never run into a really GOOD terminal application for iPad or Android tablets. There's stuff that's basically functional, but that's about it. Maybe I've just missed something.
@mike If you can create shortcuts (not sure exactly how locked down Windows gets) then you can just right click on the item after saving it wherever and hit 'Send to' -> 'Desktop' and it'll make a shortcut right to that item. (note: in win11, this is hidden in a 'Show More Options' item but is otherwise identical.) It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing
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