The production simplicity of having a standardized OS and being able to drop in a .exe and have it run everywhere without worrying about building for 1000 system combinations cannot be beat.
Enterprise Linux can fairly consistently be assumed to be RHEL, Ubuntu, or SuSE, with the first two being far more likely in the U.S. That’s not that much to ask for.
That's... not reality even on desktop PCs, and never was. If your business is more complex than selling hot dogs or ice cream (or even that on big enough scale), IT of such company will become a small monstrosity over time, and complexity of such deployments on Unix vs Windows is nothing compared to overall picture.
I see you somehow avoided learning what dll hell is, what various .net runtime incompatible versions are and what optional compatibility levels windows 10 offers.
Plus, CrowdStrike runs on Linux as well. _This time_ they only crashed Windows devices, but there's no guarantee that switching to Linux would prevent any of it.
You can switch away from CrowdStrike but I doubt you'll be able to convince whoever mandated CS to be installed to not install an alternative that carries exactly the same risks.
>CrowdStrike runs on Linux as well. _This time_ they only crashed Windows devices, but there's no guarantee that switching to Linux would prevent any of it.
In fact there was a recent CrowdStrike-related crash in RHEL:
At least on Linux it runs on eBPF sniffing so the chances of fudging something are lower. There are some supported Linux distributions where they also have a kernel module and there might a higher chance of that exploding.
There's nothing special about Windows beyond the fact that you can run arbitrary executable files. The problem could just as easily have happened for Linux or iOS/Mac and in fact it has. ChromeOS kind of works if you want to run a web application that's hosted on some web server... but it's not appropriate for running programs where a dumb browser doesn't suffice.
I'm not in IT anymore and we run 100% macs, so serious question here: isn't nearly everything a webapp nowadays? Every "non dev" thing that I have to do for work happens in my browser or an electron app. I guess maybe MS Office apps may be the biggest hitch? We use Google Workspace and that's all in browser.
It's horrible to use though. Google's suite is somewhat better than MSFT's web one, but it still is weak compared to any established desktop office suite, even libreoffice.
I've found it alright to be honest. I'd like to use libre office but the incompatibilities with .docx make it too annoying. Finally I can easily work with .docx on Linux, thanks to the web version :)