Public clouds don't dictate what people use. You can freely run windows or any other OS on an AWS or Google VPS, it's just people very seldom choose to do so, because (this is the punchline), linux is just that much more popular and developer-friendly.
The domination of linux in the hosting / server world predates the existence of public clouds. I was there, I remember.
At the turn of the millennium for a very very brief time there were a lot of windows servers running ASP.NET. That was it. Nothing has come close to linux since then, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what AWS/GCP offers. What they offer is entirely beholding to what developers like.
That makes no sense. 82% of the market is using Linux not because of the inherent goodness of the OS, it’s because Google chose to use it. If they change their mind tomorrow (see Project Fuschia and all that) there isn’t anything the Linux Foundation would be able to do about that.
This isn't true at all. Most people are using containers anyway, and guess what they're running in those containers...
ASP.net had it's day, and everyone wanted to instead run their .NET apps on linux rather than deal with windows licensing and security issues, which is why mono was so popular
Other things had their chance too, like MacOS-based hosting, and it never really took off, again because people don't want to manage closed-source production systems that they can't simply patch themselves.
