this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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No good enterprise management. Doesn't run enterprise software.
Most people don't really care what they use, they just want to be able to use it. If it doesn't run their programs, it's no good to them.
Companies don't use it on the desktop because enterprise management sucks. There's no equivalent to group policy. Ansible is not the same.
Yeah, this is pretty much it.
Microsoft took over the computing world because they built a really good enterprise management toolset. Say what you will about their shitty business practices both in history and today, both AD and GPO are fucking incredible pieces of software. Microsoft Office and Exchange email are also pretty much the only game in town unless you want to jump to Google which is objectively worse.
Those tools meant that workplaces adopted Windows instead of Mac and Linux and slowly transitioned their Unix servers to Windows. Then people started getting PCs at home, and they didn't want to learn a whole new OS. Guess what, Windows is also available for home use and does all the same things that your office PC does.
Now that Microsoft has the vast majority of the install base on PCs, it's not economically viable to develop or troubleshoot software for the other platforms, as you're putting in a ton of extra time for about 5% of users.
Until Linux can promise ~90% compatibility with all software and they can put out some kind of real competition to AD and GPO, people are going to take the path of least resistance and just get Windows.
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?
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.