Can you please point me towards someone using non-linux servers in a production environment? Besides naturally vendor locked developer tools (my company uses them to build Windows desktop software), I'm genuinely confused why someone would want Windows Server. Same is true for MacOS except my company definitely doesnt use them. Are you referring to BSD's? Or, maybe IOT or industrial things with sel4 (which doesn't seem to meet the term "server")?
It's hard to tell if you're joking or not[1], but in a typical enterprise setting, easily more than half of all VMs will be Windows Server. At every large (>10K user) enterprise or government org I've worked at, there will be typically 1K-6K Windows Server virtual machines.
First of all, there are hundreds of thousands of software vendors that have written Windows-only software. There's an enormous amount of inertia behind that. Tiny dev shops especially can't afford to rewrite their software for another platform on a whim.
Second, ASP.NET + Microsoft SQL Server was and is an excellent platform for web development, especially for internal-use apps[2]. If you're paying your dev staff $100K or more per annum, the cost of licensing is comparatively unimportant. Sure, ASP.NET Core now runs on Linux, but it's relatively new and there is no direct upgrade from the Windows-only .NET Framework.
Third, Linux-compatible databases used to come in two categories: proprietary and garbage. Using something like Oracle or IBM DB2 is basically "the same" as Microsoft SQL Server. Just as closed source, just as proprietary, just as expensive. MySQL was a hilarious joke outside of startups and remains so in the minds of anyone working in a real enterprise. It's the Microsoft Access of the Linux world. PostgreSQL is very good now, but wasn't really in the running until a few years ago.
[1] The fact that you've even asked this question rather confirms my point about the extreme level of bias seen here.
[2] E.g.: seamless single-sign-on from your desktop to a web app is literally just a boolean "Enabled"/"Disabled" config option in IIS! Doing something like this on Linux is... sucks breath in through teeth... a lot of work. https://cdn-blog.netwrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Pict...
Not joking. Thank you for the perspective. I'm still unconvinced about ASP.NET + Microsoft SQL Server being superior to the other options available today. PostgreSQL or even sqlite seem like they would be superior for an internal-use app, if you were making the choice today. Maybe that's just my ignorance of ASP.NET talking, but from where I sit, Linux soundly won the server market.
