They have the management aspect of large environments down to a tee. Apart from costs it does not really matter if your domain consists of ten, thousand or more systems. The tools to manage those systems centralized by core systems is the same set for all sizes so to speak.

That can be on one campus, across multiple cities and locations. It’s quite frankly IMO the foundation on which the success of Windows in the corporate world is built. Standardized deployment of settings across all company systems saves administrators time which can be used for other tasks instead of micromanaging clients.

I have yet to see a similar solution for Linux clients that works the same way.

Not really the way if one wants to cut ties with Microsoft completely though. And I suspect most would argue „then you can go the Windows route all the way and have less pain integrating client systems“.

Oh, Ansible is an interesting starting point. Would not thought of it for that purpose, I always „only“ link it mentally to automated deployment.

Will look into it out of curiosity.

How do you manage your fleet? How big is your network?

I‘d love to push for Linux at work, but have yet to see a solution with similar management capabilities than a Windows domain. And I don’t want to manage individual clients, as sysadmin I want to push templates like GPOs and the like.

Can see it work for smaller environments, but not in a company with a couple hundred machines.