[kristopolous]

What planet do you live on? Have you ever been to a datacenter?

Look at top500, it's literally 0% windows, https://www.top500.org/statistics/list/

Many of the VPS providers don't even have windows options because the demand is so low it's not even worth offering as a product.

Server farm sysadmins I know habitually lament they are rusty in windows whenever it's in front of them because it's completely vanished from their daily experience

If this was a survey of companies where the weight of say, a liquor store with a 20 year old beater in the back closet that they'll call a server is 1 vote, and say, all of Amazon is also 1 vote, then maybe you can get that number, but that's basically the only way

[qw3rty01]

top500 is a super computer dataset, it's not really relevant to general server market share

you could even look at Red Hat, one of microsoft's competitors, who showed microsoft's market share at 49.6% in 2017: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-continues-lead-linux-...

[kristopolous]

And over on wikipedia it says 24. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sys...

So the position moved 71 -> 49 -> 24

There's a difference again. Is "server" a chassis in a rack with redundant power and some RAID array or is it some standard computer that was christened as such? It's not a useful category because it allows for arbitrary segmenting to pump the numbers. Are we counting by service, machine, company? Depends what result you want.

If you're going to count windows machines (as in cases) by hand at a Noc, farm or center you won't be needing a calculator or likely a second hand.

Windows is certainly more prominent than Solaris or any commercial traditional unix but outside of desktops, which have a cleaner definition, it's been going in same direction for 20 years.

Microsoft has also been pivoting away from windows as a revenue source for a while. Video consoles, media companies, Azure, LinkedIn, GitHub, they don't necessarily see windows in their future and we shouldn't either

[hhw]

Not all servers are web facing or live in data centres. There are tons of small businesses that run servers in a backroom. Those are predominantly Windows.

[kristopolous]

right but that analysis isn't useful. If I used the same logic to determine a solution for hauling a large load by vehicle and looked at how most cubic meters of things are hauled, I'd probably be forced to conclude that a sedan trunk is the best option. However that's only due to the preponderance of sedans.

It's a very careful way to state the question to make it look like the numbers back what's clearly a wrong answer.

It puts the framing of "well I guess I'm using a sedan" and resituates the problem to solve all its shortcomings. It's a classic implicit framing propaganda technique.