I worked for a meat works that had Sunrays on all the corporate desktops and the IT manager (in a department of 3 supporting a billion dollar business) made the decision to move Sunrays off the clunky Solaris 10 CDE onto... Ubuntu Dapper Drake. My predecessor had worked out how to get all the bits running and we had Ubuntu on Sunray!
Yes, it's a deal breaker. I started at a large technical organisation over a decade ago and was well entrenched in using a Mac laptop. But in the support team, the default laptop was a Windows laptop. "Oh, only solution architects and so on are entitled to Mac laptops". But they allowed me to bring my own device.
So I brought my own laptop, had it re-imaged and I became the most productive employee not only in the local team but also the global team in terms of support tickets and resolution of issues. I could do tasks so much more efficiently - for me - on a Mac than in Windows.
12 months later the policy changed and support engineers could choose.
I guess the difference is I have enough experience to know that using a certain device, my productivity will be much higher than struggling in with a non optimal operating system.
Tenure also plays a part. When you're starting out as an intern or a junior associate, "you get what you get and you don't get upset" and have to make do with whatever the standard is. As a staff engineer, you can throw your weight around a bit more. :)
I worked for a meat works that had Sunrays on all the corporate desktops and the IT manager (in a department of 3 supporting a billion dollar business) made the decision to move Sunrays off the clunky Solaris 10 CDE onto... Ubuntu Dapper Drake. My predecessor had worked out how to get all the bits running and we had Ubuntu on Sunray!
Ref: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuOnSunRay