You don't see it on HN much but the Windows world is still massive, and there are still plenty of ASP.NET folk around. I'd suppose you only have to take half a footstep outside the "pure Internet services" sphere to start bumping into lots of Windows, in pretty much any direction you happen to step.

There are also whole industries where Windows has a particularly strong influence, e.g. (from experience) some parts of finance, petroleum, television, and I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work that might have grown out of a once Windows-only desktop software cottage industry.

I guess it's also important to say, much as you might find a zealous love for UNIX inside many (computer) engineering-led organizations, similar loyalty to Windows exists in many more (locally under-represented) industries for reasons that are less likely to be understood around here.

Yeah it's huge. My industry is 95% .NET. Lot of [LARGECO] use Outlook, which means the entire Office stack is dragged into use, which makes LDAP the logical choice, and Windows management of it, and then the rest of the tooling because why not...

I think its a SMB thing. Basically windows owns organizations with less than 10-30 people. And there are a _LOT_ of those, and they do a _LOT_ of custom development for their little specialization. Its the excel sheets that grow into full blown applications, or the vm.net one off utilities someone hacked together that grow into the backbone of a thriving small business. Even the generic catagory SMBs (dentists, car repair, etc) end up mostly being windows shops because the owner gets quickbooks or whatever and runs the whole thing from a windows pc in the office.

I entirely disagree with the notion that Windows is strongest in SMB. Active Directory + GPO + various third-party device management stuff, plus the depth of Office-related integrations, and Microsoft's absolutely massive track record for supporting all kinds of uses, put Windows way ahead for large-scale compliance and auditing.

On the side of deploying and managing workstations, I would take Windows every single time over MacOS or Linux. For real, some combination of Apple Business Manager and JAMF is supposed to go head-to-head against AD+GPO? On Linux--Centrify, or something from Red Hat, that might well be more costly than Windows licenses (guessing here)?

No way around using windows as a private medical practice. Too much bespoke software.

Yep. I don't think I've ever seen a computer at any of the healthcare services I've used that wasn't either ancient and running some really old bespoke software, or wasn't some flavour of Windows running slightly less old bespoke software.

> and I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work that might have grown out of a once Windows-only desktop software cottage industry

Much render farm/graphics work was once Mac territory but given Apple's ridiculous pricing and lack of server options besides stacked Mac Minis or support for NVidia stuff many have shifted away. Truly sad...

I see it's size relative to locked-in technology from the past or what individuals already know.

Currently, a WPF developer, since that was the technology chosen by the previous developer, and cannot stand working with Windows 10. People praise Visual Studios but under heavy development, crash often. It is not designed for coding/typing. Visual Studio Code is better at that and has only been around a short amount of time.

.NET / C# is useful but frameworks like Entity are layered bloat where standard SQL is so much faster and cleaner to utilize. Moving from Entity to standard SQL reduced start-up time by 10 seconds in one application. All the benefits the Entity has is only if the provider for your DB back-end has those ability coded with-in it.

I actually miss being an embedded and full-stack developer writing C, C++, go, typescript, JavaScript ... Even writing cross-platform QT5 applications in Linux and only using Mac or Windows to build and package the binaries is more pleasant.

A big part is that Linux / BSD is focused around development where Windows is a second had citizen. From the register which prevents simple backing up and restoring configuration settings fro application settings versus a config.ini file or such, which can be stored in git. Or the directory System32 = 64 bit DLLs versus SysWow64 = 32 bit DLLs. Inability to use very useful commands such as rsync and lsof or even piping through SSH. Or forced to keep useless applications around/running/installed such as XBOX or Cortana.

Example: `echo -e "#include <stdio.h>\nint main() { printf(\"Hello, world\"); return 0;}" > hello.c && gcc hello.c && ./a.out`

Even the desktop environment in Windows lacks usefulness and takes more steps then ones in Linux. Windows keeps on adding bloat to each new version. Why do I need to have the ability to run 16bit applications around if I'm never going to run 16bit applications?

These are some of the reasons I only deploy Linux VMs on Azure. Lean and only retains what you need with simple backup means and deployment.

In the mid 2000s I was working on scientific computing software running on RHEL workstations for a huge oil company. One day our customer inside this huge oil corp told us the entire worldwide company was standardizing on Windows for desktops and workstations. He said not to worry right away, because it would take them years to rip his team's lab full of Linux workstations out of his hands. I'm sure that was a massive, traumatic, and expensive transition that they would not repeat while the institutional memory of it remained, so I imagine they're still on Windows today.

That's rough... Unfortunately Windows authentication and access mgt software rules the world... I remember a lot of issues in a few environments with macOS over the years.

At least with wsl2 I get the Linux goodness and decent docker support finally, hopefully it can roll out of insiders in into GA soon so everyone can get their hands on it.

> I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work

Eh... outside of the broadcast motion graphics group, small personal/business farms, or educational institutions this is largely a majority Linux area.*

*I'm speaking from the perspective of public cloud farms and the feature film industry (for VFX and Anim). You can't escape Windows for select software and plugins, but if it's not a strict requirement by the software, then it's a business choice for other reasons (i.e. existing environment, staff, etc) because you will from a technical standpoint operate at a loss using Windows.

It's the same as infrastructure and server side.. from my corner I see a limited horizon over which little exists and only a few things over there might use Windows. Think of any industry: the first for whatever reason that came to mind was architecture. Lots of firms on ArchiCAD and that'll never change, there's no reason to. The value is not the tool or the platform underlying it, or anything else an Engineer(tm) will understand, the value is all in the buildings costing 1000x more than the 'tiny windows utility' that just happens to contribute to the result, kinda like QuickBooks or calc.exe.

It's a bunch of actual people designing buildings that cost so much more than a Windows license doing Real Things that have some lingua franca interface that has no reason to go Linux and probably never will, because in that business they're too busy with actual priorities to ever even discuss how the status quo could change. There are 10,000 industries like this, and probably 10,000 people to each of those who simply don't care, because to them the computer is and will remain only a tool. That's the world of Windows we can't see.

It's different for those of us in Anim/VFX. Windows poses a serious business cost, not from licensing, software, or administration. The vast majority of images these days are still rendered with CPU engines. Windows incurs a 15-30% time increase per frame compared to using Linux or macOS. When your frames take on average an hour minimum to over 24 hours, with thousands of frames to render, that adds up significantly in terms of iteration, directorial changes, and making deadlines.

Once you get beyond small teams doing the work, this starts to play in massively. Pretty much all medium+ sized studios have their artist pipeline on Linux, reserving Windows or macOS for tools like Adobe, ZBrush or Marvelous Designer that don't have a Linux build yet. And where I'm at, the operating system itself doesn't even matter to the artists. All they need to know is "this button opens terminal, this command puts me in the right show, this command launches the hub" and from there they're in our GUI pipeline. Their environment is the DCC, not the OS. For all intents and purposes it's completely abstracted away from them.

That's not to say there aren't those that take advantage, creating custom commands and utilities to share with others. But for the most part the fact that it's not Windows or macOS doesn't bother them.

Yes. I know Windows inside and out. I can easily navigate the UI. It does the job I need it to. I don’t want to spend my time inefficiently by toiling around in a Linux console due to some strange affinity towards Linux. I have a job to do and Windows is an effective tool I know and can use to execute the job.

If you're going solo or as part of a small team it makes sense. If you have a team that can abstract that away from your so you only have to worry about your work, then whether or not you know the OS itself means nothing. We can bypass the terminal altogether if we wanted, it has nothing to do with personal wishes or desires and everything to do with maximum performance and how the industry (film/anim/vfx) evolved.

Until an update trashes your computer that is. Or you end up spending your time inefficiently by toiling around google results for some weird issue that popped up after a forced update.

Linux updates also cause issues.

It bears repeating the the majority of software development happens on Windows (and I say that as a Mac guy).

I'm glad that the next ".Net Core" will be ".Net 5" and hopefully once people start upgrading (those who resisted "Core" will finally come over), should see Linux as a target option more readily. Of course commercial libraries and dragging them by the teeth will take longer.

Most of what I've written in the past 5+ years either targets or runs in linux/docker. It's been a challenge pulling the teams up to spead.

Was the challenge of pulling the teams up to speed efficient? Was it worth all the communication overhead and training for the benefits Linux has over Windows? What are those benefits anyways?

For the most part, nobody really cares or notices... our CI/CD and test environments run Linux/Docker but for the most part, the devs don't notice... it's still a lot of SQL and the UI is React+Redux+Material-UI.

I still get the occasional question when something breaks. That said, it would be nice if more understood some of the underlying stuff... I've had to champion a lot of the changes myself.

Yep, definitely - I've been working in Windows/ASP.NET for 10 years. More on the sysadmin side of things now, but it's still big enough to have a career.

> I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for.

I have IT experience in the "mom and pop" small-medium business world but am pretty Linux illiterate.

I can buy a copy of Windows Server 2019, install the ActiveDirectory role, create a domain, and domain-join every computer that business has, and start doing all kinds of simple-but-effective policies like folder redirection+shadow copies, define password policies, start checking various compliance boxes, formalize a file share permission structure, enable Bitlocker, etc etc etc. Also, apps for nearly any business exist on Windows.

Do Linux equivalents for any of this even exist? If they do, is there a large pool of competent admins you can hire for cheap in every non-megacity?

The shift currently is from physical servers being owned by SMB to _the same architecture_ in the cloud. As the cloud admin market saturates, you'll see the % of Linux machines in the cloud drop and drop as SMB migrates their familiar setup to the commoditized cloud market.

The bottom line is your average non-Silicon Valley user can't smoothly change between Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013. If you think a switch to Linux is possible in any timeframe less than decades, you are out of touch with the common computer user and their business needs.

EDIT: i use SMB as an abbreviation for small-medium business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterpr...

Most of what you are talking about was implemented in DCE, and there were ports to Linux but it never became popular. Microsoft certainly lifted a fair amount of this code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environm...

Interestingly, SMB is about to switch to Google's QUIC UDP, which is a great improvement.

I think the GP meant SMB = "small and medium-sized business" rather than SMB = Server Message Block (the Windows file-sharing protocol)

woops! i surely did, thanks! edited.

The number of servers that are used for basic filesharing and Domain authentication are dwarfed by the number of servers used for applications and databases. Linux has can manage a Windows Domain, but it doesn't support all the GPO's etc...

Windows can also manage linux authentication, but likewise is missing parts for advanced usage.

> The number of servers that are used for basic filesharing and Domain authentication are dwarfed by the number of servers used for applications and databases

while this is probably true, it entirely misses the point.

it's only true because a very, very small number of megacompanies consume huge amounts of servers; a more accurate number for this discussion would be server per company. Nearly every business larger than a few people has a need for a windows server (for basic filesharing and Domain authentication, not databases or custom apps) and a windows app for their business that can be filled nearly off-the-shelf.

the cost-benefit of trying to start a linux setup is not even close to worth it.

Why is it surprising?

SMEs tend to buy cheap laptops, that come with "free" Windows Home. (I don't that that version can even be added to a domain) Then they start expanding and just stick with "what works", until it doesn't.

But I see this dropping drastically in the next decade, as PC replacements(read even cheaper Chromebooks and tablets) take more hold and web takes over even spreadsheets.

Maybe not on Azure but on-prem?

Those workloads should be moved to Intune, it's a heck of a lot cheaper for SMBs ($20 for Windows+Office 365+Intune) and not hard to set up. You probably shouldn't be spinning up a new AD forest unless you have an app that needs it, cloud directories are pretty much fine.

...what? isnt intune an MDM platform? regardless, there are some pretty sizable monthly costs when you already own the competing infrastructure - "$20 for Windows+Office 365+Intune" is not accurate.

are you referring to azure AD? thats basically what i said originally - on-prem deployments are being replaced by cloud infrastructure. the point is that its a windows architecture, which is what the person i was replying to didnt understand/know.

Sorry, I meant $20 per user per month.

But it should be cheaper when it comes to refresh time (for your on-prem AD), unless you have to pony up for Enterprise (for compliance and enhanced MFA, which is more like 40 dollars per month), or if you have software which relies on on-prem AD. And Intune manages Windows systems using a combination of MDM profiles and GPO (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/configuration/ad...).

> Sorry, I meant $20 per user per month. But it should be cheaper

I understood you:

The cheapest Enterprise Mobility + Security license is ~$105 per year.

A Windows user CAL is ~$10 per year. To be on-prem requires a physical server; if a $10k server lasts 6 years, thats ~$1700 a year to do more than AD but let's assume 100% of costs are for AD. Also, the Windows Server license (depending on purchase method) is ~$100 per year.

Up until 18 users, the server investment is more expensive. [18 * 10] + 100 + 1700 = 1980 versus [18 * 105] = 1890. At everything above 19 users, EMS is more expensive, 1990 vs 1995. Note that this comparison is very slanted in favor of EMS licenses. A $10k server is more expensive than most small business have and 100% of the cost isn't actually for hosting AD (domain controllers are generally lightweight and non-resource intensive). In reality, it becomes cheaper at something closer to 8 users, which covers most small businesses that are more than just a personal laptop and a point-of-sale terminal/CC machine.

There's absolutely _millions_ of .NET web apps that target 'old' .NET framework out there. Migrating from .NET to .NET Core isn't trivial for most projects and can be very very challenging for others, to the point where it's probably not worth even attempting it. These apps will still be running for years or decades and Azure has by far the best Windows cloud experience.

>>The wackiest one I've come across is a CMS (Crematorium Management System).

If anyone is looking for something to open source: Meet manager. Since the 90s it has been the go-to software for running competative swimming meets (timing, heats organization etc). It's a niche market but is alway a very broad and steady user base. (Similar software is also used for track and field meets.)

http://activesupport.force.com/hytekswimming/articles/en_US/...

On a first skim of I thought you were saying there was crematorium software called "Meat Manager". I'm glad I was wrong.

We'll just call the repo MM, and let people figure it out themselves.

I don't have actual numbers obviously, but I'd imagine that a lot of Xbox multiplayer game backends and probably all of Xbox Live is running on Azure Windows servers, and Xbox is a pretty big platform by number of users.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/microsoft-wants-azur...

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/gaming/

This Xbox service runs on Kubernetes: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/building-xbox-game-st... (I work on Azure, focusing on Linux and open source technologies)

At least some of the Halo games used Orleans as part of the multiplayer backend:

https://github.com/dotnet/orleans

Orleans can run on .NET Core now, but I don't believe .NET Core existed when those backends were first created. So they would've been running under the full .NET Framework on Windows.

The keyword that seems to be missing from both of those links is "Windows". Seems they are running on Azure alright, but that they are using Windows doesn't seem to be so sure.

I was on the Windows platform for 15 years and moved over to Linux about 6 years ago. One thing I miss from Windows Server is that it was very stable, updates never broke anything. If you got any updates that is. I think most people use Windows server because they are locked into Microsoft technology.

I switched to Linux, and most importantly open source technology - in order to get out of the Windows ecosystem. I switched from an ASP stack to Node.JS, but it feels Microsoft is still stalking me, buying NPM, Github, releasing their own JavaScript flavor, releasing their own "open source" software bundled with proprietary add-ons, meanwhile suing Linux users for patent breach.

Similarly, I ran away from the Microsoft world because everyone was just 'drinking the koolaid'. I got out, into Python and django, and the problem was similar: everyone was drinking just a different koolaid.

ASP.NET MVC C# with EF has got to be one of the most solid web frameworks I've ever used. Open-source fanatics refuse to listen about why it's great... even though it's open source now.

I think I've kinda protected myself from that by working across multiple operating systems and different stacks. I think a lot of devs would do well to try different frameworks, different ways of programming (myself included).

I think EF might get a bad rap because it's pretty closely tied to MS SQL Server - and if you don't know exactly what you're doing it will write some pretty hideous queries for you.

Should give Dapper a try, much cleaner imho... Though one of the projects I'm on is no abstraction at all.. most of the calls are via sprocs and using JSON for data input/output from the db directly.

edit: by no abstraction, we have like 4 db methods that have a different generic type interface, but that's it across hundreds of different SP calls at the API later.

I've been an exclusive Microsoft developer since 1996. I still develop on a Windows computer to this day, mostly Node, Python, and C# .Net Core. and had no problems deploying everything on Windows servers. Then I discovered the cloud and moved into positions where the cost of infrastructure could easily be assigned to my implementations and I had to answer for the cost.

Once you add Windows to any implementation a few things happen. You pay more for licensing, you pay a lot more for resources (you can do a lot with 128MB/0.25 vCPU VM with Linux), and it is a much slower for VMs to scale in and out for elastic workloads like bringing instances up and down based on queue length.

I tried Windows server a while back for a need but it felt like a bad joke compared to Linux when the RDP one day stopped responding for no reason (had a few occasions of it) and I couldn't do anything but reboot killing the GUI app that was running in it.

On Linux l, I never had a problem with ssh unless I made a mistake in network configuration and doesn't suddenly block my access like that.

Windows also takes larger amount of resources compared to Linux and running a 1GB memory instance meant it could run out of memory anytime freezing the whole experience without doing much of anything on it. Not sure why 1GB instance even exists as it's quite useless.

I feel like I'm doing a job inside ssh session but feels I'm being dragged down with mouse click achieving very little per second. On Linux, automation can be done anyway you like but on Windows, that's just not the way it's meant to be with random GUI apps. No idea how to back up configs of those or invoke actions programmatically.

And you have to pay for the license.

Windows is a consumer OS by design.

I went for a while of bumping into lots of job opportuntities using the Microsoft stack, and thought perhaps it would be good for my career to learn a bit.

But the barrier to entry seemed so high at the time - you needed MSDN subscriptions, paid IDEs, and paid servers. All out of my reach as a self taught junior developer.

I don't know how or where everyone learnt it all, except as graduate developers at BigCorp?

Most Microsoft technology is completely free for non professionals. PC came with a Windows CD or the OS was per-installed already. You could install IIS (ASP server, l.limited to 5 users) from the Windows CD. I used the classic notepad.exe to code. It was kinda standard to buy the Office package, which came with a file based database. There where plenty of free tutorials on the web, and IIS also had some examples. And there where services that would host your web app for free. If you wanted to do "real" programming you had to buy books and a compiler which was super expensive.

Moving to Linux was a new world opening, that I had only seen glimpses of before. Using apt-get to install an app was mind blowing. Getting used to the command line took a while, but now I do everything from the terminal, except some GUI apps and the browser. Still have to look up most commands and read man pages though.

I think my experience might have been crippled a bit by having had a mac as my main PC since university, meaning less easy access to a non-locked down Windows installation.

Much the same way as Windows users probably are not big objective C developers...

It just felt like for a server language like .NET that your personal laptop shouldn't really matter much.

In that space, you'd mostly have needed to use Mono and MonoDevelop, depending on the time-frame.. after MS bought Xamarin, Visual Studio for Mac is actually a descendant of MonoDevelop

Windows license is still $199 for us Mac users ;)

And even if you're buys a laptop, then you must pay extra for the "pro" version of Windows to actually install IIS. (Last time I tried installing IIS on Win7Home - it just told me that my OS wasn't supported)

I have IIS on my Windows 10 Home Surface 6. I have encountered no problems at all; I did not buy it with this in mind, but now it's doing all my dev work. Biggest problem is that Teams uses 600 MB to sit idle so I never have any memory to do anything interesting.

I've never had to pay for my own MSDN, IDE or server while I was in the Microsoft development ecosystem. In many cases, my employer would pay for those things, and it was usually generously flexible - i.e. I could build Windows machines and install Office at home off those licenses. The Community edition of Visual Studio has been sufficient for quite some time, though I'm sure there are cases where it is not.

Anyone running a copy of Windows could run a free copy of SQL Server (Express) and SQL Server Studio, IIS Express and the .NET Framework using VS Community to build MVC apps. You would use the Web Platform Installer for just about any of those things.

Between https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet (previously https://asp.net) and https://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx it's generally very easy to dip your feet in the waters.

(All that being said, I'm now in the NodeJS ecosystem. It's... interesting!)

You don't have to pay for anything to learn the Microsoft stack.

- Visual Studio Community Edition is full featured and free

- SQL Server Express is free

- You really don't need IIS but it is free. With C# you can run on top of Kestral.

This is true now but it wasn't when I started doing dot net development ~10 years ago. If it wasn't for my employer covering the costs I wouldn't have been able to do it.

There were free editions but they were crippled versions of the paid ones with no extensions, etc. The free versions were generally unloved and had annoying quirks.

At the time you needed to add a Resharper license in there too to be decently productive which was yet another overhead.

I disagree that Resharper was required to be "decently productive". Resharper turned your Honda of a Visual Studio into a Lexus, and Java developers (who were already used to Lexuses of their own) appreciated it... but you can still drive around with a Honda. Similarly, the limits on extensions in Express editions wouldn't hinder learning .NET development, or even working on most projects.

However, VS Express itself took a while to appear. Back when .NET first appeared, the only thing that was free was the .NET Framework itself (including command line compilers), and online MSDN documentation. Eventually, we got SharpDevelop.

But, well, there's free, and then there's free. In my home country, you could buy a bundle of CDs with complete VS 2002 + MSDN distribution on the black market for around $20. Which was still expensive for students, mind you - so the same bundle was then shared around the class (including the teachers, who only had an older bundle of VS6).

I learned from the sdk command line and a book... mostly because after 9-11 within a couple months my day job and side job were gone and had lots of time on my hands for about 8 months... through the later betas and the 2002 release I hadn't touched an IDE for it... after I got a job though, kept up with it... but SharpDevelop worked for me for the most part in the earlier years.

Fair point. I’ve been developing commercially with Visual Studio since 2000. I never had to try to learn it on my own.

It wasn’t until 2014 when MS started releasing the non crippled version.

But consider yourself lucky. Do you know how hard it was for middle schooler to get a good 65C02 assembler in the 80s like I had to?

I never used Resharper and stay away from JetBrains products as much as possible, with exception of Android Studio.

It looks like they design for developers with gaming rigs and ten finger chords, I even start enjoying using Eclipse again after spending a couple of months on a Java assignment with InteliJ.

Then my .NET team wonders why I never complain about VS speed and crashes, easy, I am the only one not using Resharper.

Sure, now, but when I was starting out a decade ago, everything seemed to be quite big money.

Even reading the docs seemed to need a login and paid subscription.

I used "C# The Complete Reference" with the command line compilers to learn it in the later beta and through the 2002 release. No IDE, just a windows desktop.

I think VS Community started in 2015... there was also a SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop option in between, from pretty early on. I used SharpDevelop on my own projects for a number of years. Around 2011 I started using Node more and have been back and forth on projects since.

Visual Studio Express was available before Community getting available.

Had forgotten about express tbh... I thought there was something, but have either had access to a company version, or used SharpDevelop (at least in earlier years).

Could you please provide a link to some cases where Microsoft is suing Linux users for violating their patents? I thought they stopped that practice years ago.

You mean, except for every major Android manufacturer paying exFAT tax?

Microsoft certainly don't sue as much as they used, but that's because they are no longer developing as much groundbreaking tech. And when they do develop something, everyone avoids touching it with ten-foot pole (see also: "success" of UEFI on ARM devices).

Microsoft made an official statement almost a year ago that it was OK to use exFAT, and they published the specs as well.

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/08/28/exfat...

I won't argue how groundbreaking their technology is of late, but in all fairness they have been much more open with their code.

If you use rhel the guarantees are also very strong though it requires some extra steps to package and distribute your own software. Ubuntu on the other hand I've found breaks stuff often enough to be a nuisance.

Try OpenSUSE, it has a more recent kernel then RH, it's still rock solid, and it has a great community.

Aside from breaking stuff all the time, Ubuntu seems to have wide swings in the quality of documentation.

Snapcraft fixed that

I worked on a derivatives system for a bank where we had a few thousand servers globally running distributed calculations. We chose C# over Java as it was more powerful at the time. Windows server was rock solid throughout, it also had the benefit of being integrated with Windows security. Now Linux you can run dotnet applications OK we'd probably choose that because its cheaper not because its better. Most server applications you just need a bare OS and run a process, it doesn't need much.

It C# the reason why we have to ingest CSVs attached to emails and use SMB/FTP(not sFTP, btw) to integrate with banks?

Btw - "more powerful" is literally the ultimate subjective statement.

no

The real skill I try to teach my pupils, when joining top down ICT skills to bottom up CS / hacker skills, is to be able to re use existing tools in new and creative ways.

This is especially applicable if you learn a bunch of generic “everything is a text file” hacker skills, maybe with a little code on top.

Could you manage the crematorium using YAML files edited in GitHub? Maybe. Any collaborative tool with tagging can usually be beaten hard enough with a hammer to turn it into something useful in a specific domain.

We make pens and paper and do all sorts of specific business with these generic tools. Encouraging the generic use of computers might seem like dragging us back to the 1980s, but it’s how these tools were meant to be used!

I definitely agree with you in regards to the "everything is a text file" thing, but the average computer user doesn't know how to properly utilise text files and manage them effectively.

This is similar to the fact that basic knowledge of file systems and file formats is lacking in many modern teenagers, because this is all abstracted away by smartphone apps and cloud storage.

As a tech guy, I'd love to run the crematorium using YAML files in GitHub, but the reality is that the target audience for the system is Funeral Directors and Cremation Assistants, so it needs to be a non-technical user interface.

Identity management with Active Directory is probably the biggest plus of a Windows environment; there's a saying that goes something like "in the end, every identity system ends up trying to be AD". Sure, you can run OpenLDAP on Linux and effectively get a domain controller, but the ready-to-go nature of AD on Windows Server is very compelling, especially for larger businesses.

+1. Did a lot with LDAP auth in an all-linux environment but AD is much easier, IMO. I'm not even much of a Windows guy, but the pools documentation/youtube vids/number of people to ask the question to are way deeper.

Don't use openldap, use FreeIPA (aka RedHat Identity Management). It covers most of AD's functions except GPOs, such as kerberos, HBAC, PKI, 2FA, HA, joining a client to a domain and so on. Nice GUI, decent CLI, installer takes care of everything on the client.

As a sysadmin, I support way more Windows servers than I'd like, mostly because they run some .NET CMS (Content Management System in this case): Umbraco, Kentico, SiteCore etc.

Most mind-blowing use case of a Windows server I've encountered was a server running nothing but nginx.

How hard was it to maintain that nginx only Windows server compared to doing the same on Linux?

Not much. Standard nginx commands work in cmd (like "nginx -t"), and most of the work I did was kicking out one of the production servers when new deployment was in order and letting it back in to serve requests after it finished.

On the bad side, I just couldn't be bothered to create a script that would do that automatically, which resulted in one or two downtimes when I accidentally just tested the changes instead of reloading nginx for them to take affect ("nginx -s reload"). Repeated boring work lead to more carelessness, which would absolutely not happen if it was on any Linux system. I'd create an Ansible script(s) instead and wouldn't have to log into the servers manually for that one frequent use case.

One thing I wonder though, is that whether Windows has monitoring tools like Monit, so that incidents are automatically detected and reported.

Our old office was across the street from a crematorium and we had a public wi-fi named "xxxxxx Family Funeral Home" with a landing page with a link to a (fake) crematorium web control panel, complete with a fake live view of the cremation (it was actually just looped gif) You could adjust the temperature, the speed of the exhaust fans, etc.

Anyway, we have Windows servers running in Azure because we do a lot of GPGPU work, and the NVIDIA/CUDA drivers work best in Windows.

A few use cases come to mind:

- Microsoft often bundles discounts for their their desktop and server licenses (used for AD and such) with Azure credits. Managers are under pressure to use the free service to deliver value, so teams are told to spin up things in azure as they see fit. reject the credits and reject the discount for the stuff you do use.

- Office 365, Outlook, Xbox Live, Xbox Music and Video, the Microsoft website, MSN, Search, and Visual Studio Online all run in Azure either in whole or in part. If you think Microsoft doesnt dog-food their cloud to pump its numbers, you probably werent around when they bought out shared hosting providers "park website" clusters and converted them to IIS instances to inflate their Netcraft numbers against Apache.

Azure has some decent services, and a lot of people do run Windows beyond MS's own services. That said, I'm surprised the Linux users aren't closer to 75%, and bet they will be with kubernetes uptick over time for newer projects.

Office 365, Outlook and Xbox Live definitely aren't run on Azure.

SQL? There are literally millions of production SQL databases out there and custom apps built on top of them - and while MS may have created a Linux port, there's no planet on which the average enterprise is moving to SQL on Linux without VERY good reason (and there currently isn't one that I can see outweighing the risk).

A company I consult for specializes in SQL Server applications. There is a significant push to Linux from both the largest customers, paying over 150k$/month for server licensing and hosting, and from the smallest companies, who are severely budget-conscious. The big customers have teams fluent in both Linux and Windows, and the smallest outsource their DBAs and sysadmins, so in both cases the cost is mostly a one-time development cost and maintenance goes on as usual.

The medium-sized enterprises (100MM$ to 500MM$ annual revenue) are the ones who aren't looking at Linux. These are the ones with in-house tech support, who only know Windows. Maybe they are the average customers that won't switch over?

Note that I'm only talking about cloud-hosted SQL Server installations. When you're buying the whole infrastructure stack, it's a different story. Also, this isn't the area I specialize in, so this is just a narrow observation, not a broad pattern.

I'm surprised to hear that to be quite honest. The feature gap is still pretty significant for any serious production deployment. MS is working hard to close the gap, but given basic enterprise features like database mirroring still aren't there - I'm not sure why any large enterprise would shift at this point.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-...

My understanding is that feature (database mirroring) was deprecated many years ago, for availability groups. There were some limitations in the Analytics area, but that customer was using another solution for most of that anyway. There were also some features of SQL Agent that were discarded (scheduling events or something) but in each case there is some officially supported route to accomplish the same task.

You can find most of the material we reviewed in the official MS documentation:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-...

For example, here's the note about deprecating database mirroring:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-...

> Database mirroring, which was deprecated in SQL Server 2012, is not available on the Linux version of SQL Server nor will it be added. Customers still using database mirroring should start planning to migrate to availability groups, which is the replacement for database mirroring.

Availability groups are great on paper - in practice they add latency which many customers can't and won't tolerate. MS has been aware for years and still hasn't found a fix. Not sure hwy I'm getting downvoted - I'd assume people without SQL experience looking at a data sheet thinking it tells the whole story...

I believe you! The documentation says one thing, but in practice there are often hidden gotchas that can be extremely frustrating. Especially with respect to Azure, but even with the regular product. Microsoft has amazing sales teams, and some amazing engineers, but the overall quality of their engineering as delivered perhaps could use some work -- too much frustration, not enough delight.

> given basic enterprise features like database mirroring still aren't there

Database mirroring has been deprecated for several years. The replacement is Always On Availability Groups, which is vaguely supported on Linux.

MS WANTS customers to move to AGs but it introduces latency, which is why mirroring still exists in SQL 2019 and will indefinitely.

SQL is a language. Perhaps you meant a particular implementation like Microsoft SQL Server?

Thank you for being pedantic. Clearly in an article focused on Microsoft, where I specifically call out Microsoft porting SQL to Linux, I meant the language and not the product. I'll be sure to type out "Microsoft SQL Server 2019™" because who would know what I'm talking about otherwise? Oh right, you and everyone else on HN.

I’d recommend checking out .NET Core and F# or C# 8. Honestly .NET is becoming my go-to for anything beyond what a bash script can offer because it’s typed, functional or OO, has great frameworks for basic MVC sites or desktop apps, and the IDE on Windows is amazing while being able to compile cross-platform.

It’s not just for enterprises!

The only thing that really shits me with .NET Core is that their idea of a "single executable" deployment is really a self-extracting zip file with an entire copy of the runtime.

These days many of my deploy targets are docker images anyway, so not as much an issue... though looking at Rust with great interest.

For anything less, I reach for Node first, only because I can get something done faster.

Then have a look at Deno. Best of both worlds.

Other than bespoke enterprise apps, my guess would be the majority of the remaining Windows machines run SQL server.

Doesn't SQL server run under Wine or https://reactos.org/wiki/ReactOS ?

If you have wine in your production stack you gotta be doing something wrong. I did have some reporting tools run in Dosbox though as we couldn’t get the printer working without it. And it printed the reports and OCR’d them in because every time someone tried to rewrite that reporting tool they never got the same numbers and nobody wanted to be the one who answered the question as to “well whose right”

Microsoft officially support SQL Server on Linux and Docker now:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downlo...

No need for emulation.

The docker images have been great... can spin up a fresh install and deploy schema and config in a couple minutes for local development.

Microsoft supports SQL server on Linux. No need for Wine.

Are you seriously suggesting either of these are appropriately dependable options for running a production database? Let alone supported options!?

I would bet that the license doesn’t encourage that, and SQL Server is the sort of software where the license is king.

The vast majority of Windows servers I’ve deployed in Azure are either domain controllers or legacy workloads that a customer wanted to just shift to Azure. Azure Domain Services and Azure AD still have some deployment complexities when compared to a scaled out domain.

I burned through a lot of Azure credit playing Football Manager on beefy instances, but presumably that's not representative.

>The wackiest one I've come across is a CMS (Crematorium Management System).

https://www.mortware.com/

There is so much software written in Microsoft Access in my country that is basically irreplaceable. They have created interfaces to all the common industry software, vendors and devices and have all the common business processes built in.

Big chains probably have these things integrated in their ERP and CRM or use a custom software solution. But for smaller chains in their respective industries I don't see how you move these programs in the cloud right now without a complete rewrite.

Microsoft uses Windows behind the scenes on a lot of their managed services, but specifically for VMs on Azure... I'm as clueless as you (and I say that as someone who work in the enterprise space for mostly Microsoft shops).

I was surprised to see that the web server for www.microsoft.com reports via the 'Server:' header that it runs on IIS 10.

To me that just seems weird... even though it's their product.

It's out there. One website that always impresses me with its extreme speed is McMaster-Carr. Their Server header also claims they're using IIS.

re: Crematorium Management System, it might be possible to do that rather easily with a CRM? I develop mostly with CiviCRM (https://civicrm.org). It is contact-centric (rather than sales-centric), with good workflows for communications. You can add custom fields or custom activity types to track specific types of data or activities.

However, my experience in those kind of niches, is that the client will likely be very non-technical, and will prefer to use what everyone else is using, even if it's vastly overpriced and locks their processes in place.

A lot of applications use commercial components, that tend to be tethered to windows security models for registration/activation reasons.

Many internal apps likely don't need to target windows, but may have windows-isms baked in for a number of historical reasons. There are also a lot of .Net apps tethered to windows more out of heritage, most are easy enough to port, others much harder, it varies and there's a lot of apps unlikely to receive the effort to even explore the feasibility of migration to either mono or dotnet-core.

My understanding is that if you're using Microsoft's Hypervisor product, the management console allows you to seamlessly deploy either to a VM on local hosts or in the Azure cloud (presumably through a VPN). I imagine that makes it easy to spin up those extra windows machines and licenses you need to support all the extra Active Directory add-ons you can get (inventory management, update management, SQL server to handle their data, etc) on Azure rather than procuring more hardware.

> I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for.

I'll bet that there's a huge number of virtual desktop machines. Instead of having to push a really fat windows disk image with all the apps installed, to all workstations, those workstations run remote desktop, and connect to a windows VM running in Azure.

Virtual desktops or straight up on-prem to cloud migration might be my guess. If big companies can avoid it, why pay the cost of a rewrite?

> Crematorium Management System

Genuine question: why can't you use Microsoft Access or G Suite for this? Seems like the canonical data entry use case these products are designed for.

A Crematorium Management System built in Microsoft Access is still a Crematorium Management System.

I use a lot of Windows machines in the cloud as build machines for video games.

Many of the services Azure offers run on Windows, these are probably included in the number of total machines.

For example, the managed Postgres service runs on Windows which I didn't expect.

> I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for.

Willing to bet it's SQL Server and Azure AD

I've built a few pentest labs with AD and Windows VMs but that's it.

.NET, also IIS and Windows 10 Server UI is more useable than a Linux server console in my opinion. I used to be a Linux server guy, but then I started using Windows Server and IIS and never went back and I don’t think I’ll ever want to go back.

Running MS own services like Teams and Office359?

Legacy sharepoint ?

I’ve never heard of a crematorium management system, but once when I was doing the rounds at my chemical factory I came across the technician who handled the burners for our boilers.

It was October so he was doing a checkup before firing them up. I went in for some PR chit-chat. Unfortunately he took it as a genuine occasion for conversation (genuinely lovely guy, genuinely liked him, genuinely liked the conversations, but... well...)

“Yeah yeah, you guys are great, calling me in to do preventative maintenance before firing ‘em up.” “Yeah, it’s protocol, I guess.” “Yeah yeah, but not everybody follow protocol y’know...” “Really?” “Yeah yeah, no... just came over from the crematorium.. they had a fat client inside and the burner conked out and we had to pull ‘em out half-done and let the chamber cool off so I could service the damned thing.” “...” “Yeah yeah, real bitch of a mornin’. Family there and everything. Waiting for the ashes, y’know?” “That must’ve been awkward.”“Yeah yeah, no no, they understood... you only do these things once, y’know... yeah yeah... bitch of a mornin’.”“Well I guess I’ll leave you to it then.” “Yeah yeah see you around."