To not much official fanfare on Thursday, the Windows operating system turned 40 years old, marking four decades since Windows 1.0 debuted in the United States on November 20, 1985. Its midlife milestone comes with a crisis, though. Diehard Windows users are switching to Linux for a variety of reasons.
For one, gaming is finally better on Linux machines, which makes the moat Windows dug for itself a little more passable. Add to that the end of support for Windows 10 in October, the growing frustration among power users about Microsoft Recall, and the growing number of polarizing features, and power users are finding plenty of reasons to make the switch to Linux.
It’s unclear if the wave of Windows power users loudly moving to Linux has crested yet, or if this is just the beginning. That said, the past year has seen a flood of articles like this one, scores of posts on Reddit, and YouTube videos documenting and occasionally evangelizing the conversion to Linux.
In the public sector in a few fields Linux just isn’t an option at all, full stop, because of key pieces of software that are industry standards/straight up required for that field. CAD programs for example just makes linux a no go. Any fields that are dependant on Adobe products is another one.
I mean there are some work arounds. Winboat is promising. I’ve tried it with a few things but it’s still buggy here and there i.e. sometimes it insists on launching the full VM for whatever reason. Bottles is just…I don’t know it’s not there yet and can be frustrating. Honestly I’ve had more success running non-gaming windows applications through Steam than anything else.
Plus as others have said the public sector can be…very slow when switching to new things. Look at how long companies held on to XP and Vista to the point they had to be forced to upgrade while kicking and screaming. Hell I buddy of mine is an IT consultant, runs his own business, and he’s had new clients that were STILL on Vista and it took A LOT of convincing and work just to upgrade them to something slightly more modern.
Rookies. Not that long ago (less than 5 years) I saw an article about a business run with a Commodore 64.