Computer science is just mathematics, you can do it with pen and paper. The actual IT jobs where you don't have to touch windows are plentiful, although it might be a bit of a red flag if you're vehemently refusing to touch some specific software (be it windows, or any other program, or programming language).
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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You want to just work in a cellar? /j /obligatory
Oh, I'm a dummy, that joke went right over my head the first time!
I'm still looking for that ideal tie-in where I link it with something I care about. I don't know if I want to stay in IT, but I have to do something and at least the skills will be transferable. The work from home aspect of IT has also been very good to me. I've outperformed at 40h/week support work while taking care of sick family members and working out of my... walk out basement.
At least I have some outdoor hobbies to bring balance to my cellar-dwelling tenancies.
Don't think in term of IT. Look at R&D for big tech/cloud companies or even startups Devops or SRE type work
Source: 23 years doing sys admin, devops or SRE for major corps, still don't have a bachelor or touched windows
I appreciate the tip about R&D and startups. I ride my bike a lot and sometimes when I go through office parks or light industrial I see boatloads of tech-ish companies that have no consumer name recognition or anything. Whether it's R&D at a big cloud provider or something similar, the behind the scenes stuff is more likely to utilize Linux.
Yeah almost every company out there use Linux. Even Microsoft is on Linux these days. I've done farm stuff. Wireless stuff. Cloud stuff. Social network stuff. It's almost 💯 Linux everywhere. And everybody always need devops or SRE types (whether they'll admit it or not, I'm a software eng these days after they converted us) . Back when I was doing cloud stuff I would have killed for anybody with 10 years of personal Linux experience. All we could get were entry level people that barely understood bash
I appreciate your comment about my experience. Perhaps I'm not giving myself enough credit for what I know. I kind of know these things in isolation since my IRL friends, bar one or two, aren't very technical so I have no benchmarks to compare myself with.
I did a little bit of cloud stuff in a past job. It was a mix of billing and tech support, nothing requiring a ton of experience or certs, though a general knowledge of computers and public cloud computing was needed. A lot of people who worked there did not have it so I floated to the top pretty quick. I work hard, but I don't need the stress of being in a dysfunctional org.
Absolutely not. Unless you get into a really niche career of IT pretty much everything you do will be accessed via a windows device.
you have to understand how that OS will interact with your app and the App’s UI.
As an It professional you need to embrace Windows. it is what pays the bills.
Yes. However, you're looking for a unicorn in a very tight market.
I did it, but that was 32 years ago.
Edit: got the degree and started my career. I've had to deal with windows since then.
Your best bet might be working in university research centers. You will still have to work with windows, but most researchers are trying to save pennies and you can't do that using Windows.
I was hired 25 years ago as a systems admin. At the time I was hired, the organization used Macs in offices. Servers were running Linux, Solaris, and OpenVMS, all of which I had been supporting since college. I was valued for most of the 25 years because I could solve problems no one else could, and I did that by writing code on Linux servers.
Now I've got a manager who doesn't believe in writing code to support our users and thinks Linux is a bad word that we should never use because we might have to support it. Still, he's gung-ho for us to support every new bullshit AI that comes down the pike.
I've got 25 years of code on a Linux server that made lives easier, but I have to eliminate it all because linux is bad. At the same time every AI project our group installs needs new Linux servers set up.
All that to say, if the job you want exists, you won't be able to get it because I'll beat you to it!
I'm in my 4th undergrad year of majoring CS, and I have never had to use Windows once.
All courses that require their special programs have Linux versions or are cross-platform due to them using languages like Java, like LogicSim, RISC-V, Ocaml, SQL Workbench, etc. Some courses even exclusively use Linux.
The closest thing I have to use Windows for would be .docx documents, but even that is handled by LibreOffice.
Of course, it depends on the institute.
Someone close to me went into a scientific field and had this experience at their school. 100% Linux. They taught them how to use it for everything from the ground up; regular usage, and things specific to their discipline. I would have loved to have had the same foundational experience. My Linux knowledge grew together as a patchwork of experiences breaking and fixing things, reinstalling, hacking together solutions that should never have worked, etc.
Take a look at the Cisco CCNA.
I couldn't take a linux foundation cert exam with my arch Linux computer. It misidentified my X11 as Wayland and refused to start. They never gave me a refund.
If you are a complete hard-liner, you're going to run into one very particular, and peripheral, obstacle: your employer will almost certainly issue you a Windows laptop. It may not be a large part of your job, but it will be there. Very few companies will offer a Mac, and even fewer will offer Linux.
You might have to work as a freelancer, taking on tasks that can be done without Windows. But even something like web dev will require testing on Windows.
I want to say no.
I have a few friends heavy into IT, years of experience, numerous jobs from big tech to startups. They've all had to touch windows.
As a contract engineer with over 30 gigs in my career, every single one also touched windows.
So...can you? Probably, but it'll make the entire grind harder.
Frankly, my goal is to milk the corporations for as much money as possible - foregoing my own opinions - so I can gtfo this capitalist ride. That means playing nice with Microsoft, unfortunately.
I have definitely played nice with MS in the past and gained valuable knowledge and skills doing it. The first tech job I worked in was kind of a talent farm in the most miserable way. It was about 30% billing support, 60% tech support, and 10% sitting in the bathroom on your phone wishing you could be unborn. Poor pay, high-school-like conditions, manipulative detached upper management, absolutely unattainable goals, but you would get a resume bullet point you could then use to get hired at a bigger tech company. I did really well here, got promoted a few times, simply because I was nice to colleagues and customers and empathized with the misery of dealing with our support. A lot of my friends followed each other one at a time to better companies and I followed suit landing a tech sales/support gig. Less interesting, but almost double the money. After a few years and one layoff, now I'm searching and not even determined to stay in tech, though that's where my most marketable experience is now. On one hand, working in tech has made it harder to enjoy computers as a hobby and I hate that. On the other hand, the good benefits and median pay for my area made this last job a godsend during a very wild and chaotic few years of my life.
I agree with you about getting out of the capitalist ride. All I need is $15M so I can buy my own hot spring and retire in the mountains. :P On a less fanciful note and hopefully on a shorter timeline, I want to save enough that I can live off of the investment income or at least supplement 20hr/wk wages using the remaining time to pursue hobbies, volunteering, etc. Having that revenue stream as insurance against a situation where I cannot work anymore would be huge. Having a budget big enough to relocate to a different state if needed is already a luxury.
I find myself wondering what's coming after the AI bubble bursts. Despite Azure being okayish, I see a rough time ahead for MS. I know it's a small part of their business, but Windows is becoming increasingly toxic and I think they over-invested in AI. We're undergoing some pretty big societal/cultural shifts at the moment. South Park parodied it in a recent episode where all the blue collar workers get fabulously rich because no one knows "how to do anything anymore". What companies/industries are going to help build things back up when the tower collapses?
Having had 30 gigs, what do you think worked out best for you when it came to finding a new job?
No 🤣
Get over yourself, you're getting paid more than 95% of the planet being in IT.
Theoretically? Probably, I rarely touched windows outside of Windows centric shops. Practically, you're going to have to make that a much more blurry line
There's going to be times you have to deal with Windows. That can be as little as "effectively never" depending on your path and choices, but if you're a hardliner it's going to close doors on you just for picking a dumb hill to die on
I did touch windows in my life, but did a lot with OS/2, Solaris and Linux. I currently also use windows because some tools have crappy license management that do not work in VMs.
Raise your dongles
I managed to get through most of my computer engineering bachelor's using Linux. There were some specialized windows-only programs related to electronics design.
I did not touch Windows during or after my CS degree. No clue what people are on about needing Windows. It was a challenge on my first job where they preferred us to use VMs instead (I did not and it became the norm because it is better).
Graduated in Europe. We had a bunch going through the same. Campus computers were running Linux too. You need someone to champion it in the year and others will join.
Meh, if you're competent enough a degree really isn't worth anything.
Your portfolio is more important.
I did my BCA (Bachelor of Computer Applications) and MSc IT (Master of Science in Information Technology) using macOS earlier and Linux in the final years. We mostly did C, C++, PHP databases etc. We did have Visual Studio in our curriculum, I did try it on college PCs, but skipped it completely for exams. There was also a small section in C language which dealt with graphics. They used a graphics library which only worked with Turbo C++, which is a windows only program. It worked fine using Wine on my PC.
For the job, I am primarily a 3D animator and I use Blender, and three.js. My previous job required me to use the office PC which had Windows 11, but now I am working at another company from home using my own PCs, all of which have some flavour of Linux installed. I did mention itbefore getting hired that I avoid proprietary softwares like Windows, Photoshop or even WhatsApp on my phone. As long as I am giving them what they need, they don't have any issue with what OS I am using.
So, yes, you can have a career in IT without touching Windows, but you need to assert that before anyone hires you. It will requires an effort, but I strongly believe that it is possible.