As a programmer, I hate the content filtering and URL blacklisting which happens on a proxy level. They don't let me go to all sites because the sites contain "IRC/Messaging", "Entertainment", etc. It really is difficult sometimes. There was a time when I could not even access Reddit, even though people write some interesting and sometimes important stuff there. I cannot join the IRC channels of some products in order to ask for help. I feel a little shut-in. Sure, anyone could trick the proxy with an external proxy+TLS+custom encryption (since the proxy sometimes breaks open TLS as MITM...), but I think fighting my employer is not the point of it at all.
I, too, love *NIX and I would welcome a Distro like KaOS or Mint at work, as they are really user-friendly (as opposed to my Gentoo at home, which is a nightmare when I want to be productive, but find out that some updates or circular package dependencies get in my way). I have to use Win7 and will have to upgrade to Win10 soon.
Team work sometimes is a b*tch, when you want to use certain software, but can't, because the others have no experience using it (and don't want to learn using it, even though it would have a lot of benefits for different parts of the product lifecycle). I had to settle for Windows Server instead of RHEL, TFS instead of Git, etc.
At least they hand a CAD laptop to all developers (for speedier compile times and smoother tool usage), so I have an i7 CPU, a dedicated NVIDIA graphics GPU, and an SSD. Lucky me :)