this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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There's a scene in Space Force where a flight controller can't do something crucial because of a forced Windows update. I remember thinking "this is such a silly, cheap gag, there's no way a space organization would use Microsoft".
Well. I stand corrected.
Every organization uses Windows because they can't fathom that Ubuntu is perfectly fine to use.
Meanwhile Big Tech's backbone are mostly libre software
Big tech is at a scale where it's cheap to do an in-house solution. Amazon maintains its own distribution for internal Amazon systems
And Government isn't at scale? Its the biggest scale.
No. Many different organizations with their own requirements.
Government is also smaller than big tech, at least tech wise.
Usually it's because Windows is way cheaper to use.
How is Windows (which costs money) cheaper than Linux (which is free)?
More support is needed when switching workplaces to Linux as people are familiar already with Windows.
But will that remain the same? People are already using computers less in their personal lives.
Because businesses need support. They need to be able to rely on others to quickly get everything back in order or they lose money.
And since Linux does not have any (except for RedHat), they would need to have that support in-house. Which is a lot more expensive and still does not give all the expertise that big companies like Microsoft have.
For consumers it is free, but for businesses it costs a lot more money than using corporate standard software.
20+ years in industry as a UNIX and Linux admin. Informed but potentially biased.
Linux admins have tended in my career to be more expensive. They tend to be more week rounded as engineers. Linux by it's nature, especially in the past, required you to be a DBA, network admin, server admin, developer all in one. They can often fix problems quicker than the support engineer elsewhere can read the ticket.
That means you pay more per engineer, MBAs don't like this. This is a critical problem. You pay less overall in staff costs because you need less staff, MBAs don't understand this. MBAs like support contracts so they can offset blame.
A small, concise, tight nit, well payed admin team who have ownership and care about a product will be cheaper, and have more uptime than the alternatives. But they'll also be obstinate, high payed, entitled and ready to jump ship if you mistreat them. That means you need actual diplomacy and social skills to manage them well.
A small tight nit team with product ownership will need a kick up the arse at times to change "what ain't broke". So when product requirements need a radically different solution that can take time to change.
There is a reason that industry breaking startups in the early 2000s had their corporate backbones on Linux.
Probably the biggest source of income for open-source companies, is exactly providing support and similar services.
Less people use it which increases wages of the people that know it.
Also more hours lost when something goes wrong because of the smaller population of people that can fix it.
Wait till I tell you many nuclear power stations and submarines run ancient versions of windows for their control software
Imagine having a nuclear meltdown because of windows
I've worked in more than a couple factories and fabrication shops. Everything was on XP.
I'm not saying you can't run infra with a couple of old dells plugged in that break prod when they are cut off.
We don't talk about that.
I do think that modern manufacturing or even shipping logistics stuff having not been touched in twenty years is saying something.
We had some stuff at work that was XP until the machines started dying. They were not sure how to get around it but one option was XP in a VM.
Also we have internal websites that only work in IE Mode, because modern browsers don't render them properly. Its annoying mostly because even though Edge has an IE Mode, and you can add exception, it CONSTANTLY nags about "don't you want to use Edge? Or removes the exception with an "add back" option.
Like no Edge, it still does not render, why ard you so fucking extra about this, just render in IE mode.
And those dipshits never bothered to configure it properly?
That nagging is because it has never been forced via configuration to us IE mode. Its a feature called enterprise ie mode, but it's a configuration file (of addresses and compatibility directives) and a couple of regkeys.
Why won't you fix those internal websites? I wouldn't think it is that hard? It is just html and css isn't it?
all of my factory lines run on 98 and XP, which is perfectly fine, I can navigate them in my sleep
but management just hired a vibe coder to make a larger infrastructure for materials handling... that should work out great
At least these ancient versions won’t try to update in the middle of a sea fight.