Probably 70 or 80% of cloud workloads are Linux, and like 60% of embedded devices, of which there are billions.
And of those embedded/mobile devices, the rest will either be running iOS, vxworks, freertos or zephyr.
I think the joke has always been "this is the year of Linux", but in all honesty... it's the decade of Linux. It's probably one of the few areas where there is growth in computing capacity and by far most of the net new is running Linux.
AOSP with the more modern kernels and less vendor garbage in giant forks will help with that.
Unix was king in the 80s, maybe early 90s for anyone doing terminals, banks, government and universities were all ok the big iron train. But when nt3.1 and 3.5 came out, if you were a business not looking into it, you felt like you were behind the times. We had DEC and iris at our house, so weren't in a good position to switch, but it wasn't long before the change happened.
> The only places where NT managed to succeed on server room have been Microsoft shops, or places where .NET was adopted as the main development stack.
.NET came out well after NT was replaced with windows 2000 (unless you claim that 2000, and thus XP and later windows OSes were also NT)
> In the 80's many banks were either on mainframes/micros, or using stuff like Novel Netware.
In my experience in the late 90s NT crushed Netware. It rode the wave of computerisation of SMEs and gained massive amounts of users (with desktop often being 3.11 onwards rather than NT).
Until then it was all about ASP, Outlook, and SMB shares, nothing else.
All big stuff was on UNIX.
Again, when talking about the server room.
From 1999 to 2003, I was doing project delivery across Aix, Solaris, HP-UX, Windows NT/2000, so I might have an idea of how our customer based actually had their server rooms configured.
Likewise the university campus was wired to DG/UX, Solaris, eventually Red-Hat came into the picture as DG/UX server died.
Computer labs desktops were a mixture Windows 9X, NT, Mac and some lucky professors had a couple of NeXT Cubes, which they eventually replaced by Red-Hat (before Apple's aquisition).
> Good luck trying to run a proper GNU/Linux on those Android devices.
The Termux App [https://termux.dev/en/] provides a full linux terminal with zsh, emacs, and apt based package manager. I've been using it in lieu of creating full apks for personal projects -- much easier to spin up a database and local webserver via ssh on my phone than to build a proper app package.
I find it fits most of my linux on the go needs; for example I can pull up a node REPL and quickly test code on my phone, or curl a API endpoint
Does that actually use the underlying system or is it just a virtual thing though? It calls itself an emulator after all. Windows can run an emulated Legend of Zelda ROM but that doesn't make it a NES.
>Good luck trying to run a proper GNU/Linux on those Android devices.
How is toybox not good enough to replace the GNU coreutils for a phone? Or what GNU software are you talking about that someone would even want to run on a phone?
I'm my family we have two desktop computers and a laptop. One desktop is running Linux, the other and the laptop are windows.
But we're also running Linux on all our phones, two tablets, two TVs, the vacuum cleaner, our router, and probably more devices I'm forgetting or not aware of.
> Are there really 20-30% of cloud workloads not on Linux?
> What do they do? Who uses them?
I don't know about the percentages but there is at least one b2b e-commerce website application thing with the latest version built with ASP.NET MVC on dotnet 4.8 so it has to be on Windows.
It isn't "cloud" by any means but you can create an EC2 instance or an Azure VM or whatever and put Windows on it and run IIS and all those things.
That and I think on Azure, you can run things like Azure functions and Azure web apps on Windows.
I also don't understand why people would pick Windows to run modern software where you have a choice.
I work at Microsoft and I see so much "cloud" Windows. Some of it is running Kubernetes even. But a lot Azure is Windows VMs orchestrated by "Service Fabric".
Azure Service Fabric is actually excellent. Deployed a web service on top of it 5 years ago, so far it hasn't gone down even once. Service fabric is used in scale by internal Microsoft teams such as Bing and Xbox, so the bugs and the scaling issues have been ironed out.
Yes! Especially if your application is legacy/old and requires Windows anyway. I used to think why people would do that when you can dockerize SQL Server and just use Debian or Fedora or whatever but I once tried that on a legacy application and things... were not quite right.
It was easier to install on Windows than to debug the issue so I just let it go.
I think things would be different if the code was new or I was familiar with it enough to anticipate how it could break in different ways.
If the code/framework is new enough, it might be worthwhile diving into that rabbithole.
But you need SSMS on a Windows client to manage it effectively. Unless you are doing everything cli, which is just not practical in the enterprise. Anyway, running it in Linux is pretty niche. Cool for show and tell, but you need balls of steel if you're going to try running even a small $100 million dollar business on it.
Last I checked, Azure data studio did not have feature parity with SSMS. Sure you can write TSQL, view and edit procedures. But that’s about where it ends.
You can’t deploy SSIS packages, can’t edit user accounts and permissions, can’t manage linked servers, etc. Sure you might not do those every day, but if you have to jump through all these hoops to do something I wouldn’t call ADS a full replacement.
ADS can't really do this, as others have mentioned. Years in the future, they will get there. It's not remotely capable yet. And even many of the dialogue boxes that they've added recently are just opening in SSMS which still requires Windows.
Yes, which is why I said “and signal”, which is to say it isn’t marketed as such and so consumers don’t know that. To them, they’re running Android OS, for better or worse.
Quite hilarious to see some HNers who cannot even read the title of the article and are compelled or have the urge to bring up other irrelevant statistics to hide the little to no desktop usage when compared to other desktop operating systems.
The more things change... I've seen mostly identical (in spirit, not in technical details) discussions about the "Year of Linux on Desktop" in 2013, which was 10 years ago. I am quite sure I can safely bet the discussions 20 years ago, in 2003, were also pretty much the same.
And of those embedded/mobile devices, the rest will either be running iOS, vxworks, freertos or zephyr.
I think the joke has always been "this is the year of Linux", but in all honesty... it's the decade of Linux. It's probably one of the few areas where there is growth in computing capacity and by far most of the net new is running Linux.