"It just works" is a factor for a lot of people and businesses.
Whether or not this is possible because Microsoft is an aggressive, monopolistic company is a different conversation altogether.
I pulled up Azure last weekend to see what the pain level would be on standing up a new corporate environment for our organization. It turned out to be so easy I just did most of it on Friday night. The thing that was most staggering to me was the ease with which I could provision AD DS services. I don't even know where those computers are. I am more than happy to not have that problem on my hands anymore. Some of you will argue that this is a perk of Azure and not Windows, but I would say that Windows is the enabling factor behind a lot of this automation.
On Monday morning, I handed everyone new windows credentials and it all just worked. No fucking bullshit. VPN, certs, office, outlook, visual studio, everything.
For organizations that don't have time for bullshit, Windows seems like a reasonable option to me. I know a lot of you can come up with an unlimited supply of one-off reasons why windows should never be used, but the harsh reality is the entire ecosystem considered together is fucking wonderful if you don't have an unlimited IT budget and need to turn a profit to survive.
I'm in the middle of installing Windows for business purposes, and this is far from my experience. I've yet to see it "just work."
Installation was a hassle! THREE hours just staring at a various setting-up screens. And then it has the gall to bully me for using an offline account; it screeches about my "diminished experience" because I refuse to accede to its native advertising. Want to uninstall Edge? Sorry, your moral superiors at Microsoft decided it's better for your own good that you don't.
Now I'm having to jump through hoops to figure out how to get it to use a shared directory, all because Microsoft decided they _just_ had to cut its own path through the CLI jungle as opposed to just using bog-standard bash.
The ecosystem seems user-hostile and full of more bullshit than any amount of Linux. I just don't see it.
Nit pick: Bash is only standard on GNU, it has never been standard anywhere else. You may be thinking of the Bourne shell, although neither bash nor the Bourne shell include a standard for shared directories, so I'm curious what you mean is bog-standard there.
I'll have to review my shell terminology; however, I'll assume you're correct here, and in that case I'll eat crow on both points. I appreciate the nit-pick! It's good information, and an obvious blind-spot that I should improve upon.
The "bog-standard" I'm referring to is my ability in various Linux distros to easily find and mount network-shared directories. I assumed this was some power of bash, but if not then I'll reflect on that and find whichever utility enables the ease of my workflow.
Well, better is subjective but a couple of reasons that make it a default choice for most use cases:
- User familiarity
- Prevalence
- Pre-installed
As an aside, I’ve installed plenty of Linux instances on people’s old hardware. In situations where I’ve set it up so everything “just works”, and where they were not big Windows users in the first place (so didn’t have to re-train muscle memory/find things) I found they got along just fine.
