Not really.
They put it on desktop with packaged software. The software they develop themselves run almost exclusively on Linux.
We tend to dramatically under-estimate the market share of Windows in engineering.
I have no trouble believing that most companies run Windows and develop on Windows. I just don’t particularly want to work for these companies.
But programmers have many more choices, and visual studio shops aren’t very common anymore, at least in the developed world, and I would bet countries like Russia and China as well.
I use Arch btw.
When Shute uses three dots it means, "Use your own imagination. Conjure the scene up for yourself." (pause)
Whenever I see three dots I feel all funny.
Or as a passive-aggressive suggestion that you're incorrect in whatever is being responded to.
Definitely no (positive) funny feelings.
But that was a long time ago. Along came Google whose master plan looks to have been to turn the web browser into the business platform of choice. Seemed like insanity at the time. Yet here we are. Browsers have since become masters at playing video, can handle interactive voice, and can talk directly to the GPU. Now Microsoft wants you to use Excel of all things in a a web browser and has dropped the Windows native version of Outlook in favour of the web one packaged as a desktop app. Seems like Google made it's vision work.
I know there are some heavyweight applications out there like video editing and Engineering CAD with finite state analysis that need raw metal performance. But they are few and far between, and aside from them - who is doing Windows native development any more? Certainly not the firms that make accounting packages - the abandoned Windows long ago. For those that are left - are they going to survive the transition to ARM and RISC-V?
POSIX / Linux / BSD / whatever applications - they continue to be as strong as ever. They drive embedded at one end, and the servers at the other. That sort of development is easiest to do on the the target platform, and since it dominates now Windows had to emulate that platform if it wanted to keep the developers. Which is how we got to WSL.
But Windows native app development - that seems like it belongs to a bygone era. Now even Microsoft develops own apps target Electron, not Windows.
I indeed have the impression that some industries (e.g. banking, insurance, development of engineering tools (e.g. CAD applications), PC gaming, ...; observe that at least banking and insurance are two financially quite powerful industries) have a lot more love for the "Microsoft ecosystem" (Windows; in banking and insurance also Microsoft Office) than Microsoft actually does. Thus, in these industries Windows (and Microsoft Office) is used and Windows software is developed despite Microsoft's actions and stance.
Yes, but that's because I moved companies. The bank in question still uses Windows.
> I know there are some heavyweight applications out there like video editing and Engineering CAD with finite state analysis that need raw metal performance.
WASM and WebGL etc (or whatever the newest developments are called these days) are there to make working in the browser faster.
Btw, if you have beefy enough servers, it's not the 'weight' of your application that's the problem, but the latency.
> For those that are left - are they going to survive the transition to ARM and RISC-V?
Just recompile, or use the automatic translation of binaries that comes with your OS.
And even if you, for some insane reason, decide to pick Linux and fight its technological challenges, in the end only a tiny percent of users is going to use your product. Yet they will be responsible for generating over 50% of the bug reports. To make matters even worse, most of them will come from Arch Linux users, providing absolutely useless debug traces because they use a distro notorious for not shipping the debug packages.
You have disproportionately more beginners using it than more seasoned professionals. Hell, I barely use it, and I have questions every day - I just look up the documentation instead.
This is like saying most people love overpriced dropshipping, just because an advertisement company tracks how many of the people who click on ads buy dropshipped garbage. Its a massive bias.
Windows for development is really a common choice if you make video games, hospital, school software or desktop stuff. But even there there are exceptions. It's unfortunately a common choice in some, esp. American companies where the product is intended for Linux, but they would still hand out Windows laptops to the employees because of their bad / backwards IT that only knows ("knows" is an exaggeration here...) how to work with Windows. So, it often comes to that an employee gets this decrepit system, but then works on Linux anyways, but the experience is worse because they need to jump through some hoops to get to the system they actually work with.
Anyways, any claims about what "most corporations" do smells like LinkedIn posts promoting a technology, where the claims are usually made w/o any research but also any way to disprove the claim. Just don't go there.
So, by the time we became Google, nobody really thought about it as a viable option.
There's a clear dichotomy internally in choice of operating system. Corporate, project managers, and people managers use Windows. Developers and technical people use Linux (and we used to support Mac OS but that was recently dropped). Recently Corporate IT decided to move on-prem services to a Microsoft-hosted SaaS cloud, which caused some pain for the majority of employees but there was some kind of kickback or discount and some line in a spreadsheet was tortured to reveal the right numbers, so the deed was done.
Of our customers, about one third run our product on Microsoft Windows and two thirds on Linux. We certify both but only Linux gets dogfooded and support for Windows customers tends to be higher. The only people who ran our product on Mac OS when it was available were students and hobbyists and small startups whose license fees wouldn't keep our office lights on long enough to walk to the coffee machine.
Who do you think writes all the Windows software? There are hordes and hordes of people writing code on Windows for Windows all their lives. Server/web software aside, there are huge layers of windows-only software.
My personal observation is quite different - this is clearly written by someone who lives in his bubble.
Most obviously: most corporations do use Windows. Also for technology startups outside of the "web application operator" type (here it depends a lot on the local culture), many use Windows: often because this is what the customers use, and the software/service of the startup has to be compatible with the ecosystem of the customer.