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.
Do they really though?
The company I work for has 150 employees. Granted, most of those are across various departments in the worlshop, so don’t use computers as part of their core work, but we have around 50 PCs around the site.
We don’t have a dedicated IT person. We should, but we don’t (currently), because our boss is the kind of old skool employer who doesn’t really understand why we need that many computers when they didn’t have them back in the '70S. I would suggest that there are far more mid sized businesses like that where the boomer owner holds a similar view than you might think. Or I’m wrong and just looking at it through my particular lens. But having worked for a bunch of mid sized engineering firms over the years, little about my current employer strikes me as particularly different from the others.