the issue with this take is that they have been transitioning their enterprise services to web services. i and others on my team effectually use Microsoft enterprise tooling on Mac and Linux machines. i don’t think AD has anything to do with desktop Linux adoption?

[–] Maddier1993@programming.dev 2 points 4 days ago

You're ignoring 20+ years of how it was the only player when web wasn't so big as it is today. It was a major reason windows became the default OS in many offices, and as an extension of that, in the majority of homes in the 2000s to 2015. Thus majority of software industry and video gaming companies made their home in windows. Adobe Photoshop, AutoCAD, and many other industry software was made to work in Windows first.

There was also the case of Microsoft tilting the playing field by significantly discounting laptop and Desktop OEMs for Windows license keys just to be the sole OS installed on many computers. The concept of a PC was one which was running some version of Windows.

This also lead to another compounding aspect: Piracy of windows software made the windows AD/Server experts of today. Since Linux was free, there wasn't as much of an intrigue on running it vs. A pirated copy of windows running pirated copy of many software.