[mellosouls]

There was a critical time in the industry, if your tech didn't run on Linux it was dead in the water.

No. I can't remember that ever being a thing, I've no idea where you got that idea from.

[eitland]

I guess it was more Mac than Linux, and it happened around peak Rails.

[pjmlp]

Except outside wealthy countries, macOS doesn't really matter and has about 20% market share across the globe.

[eitland]

True, and on a global scale 20% is even a much larger percentage than I would have expected.

My point however is that when I started working in IT I was the only one at the places where I worked who used something other than Windows whenever possible and also advocated for it.

Then there was a change. And as far as I can see that change started with screencasting and as far as I saw, the first widely popular screencasts that existed was Rails, created mostly by 37 Signals (now Basecamp I guess) and other Rails devs/enthusiasts.

I might be wrong about this but I feel fairly certain these guys drove a lot of the change in peoples and organisations attitude to alternative OSes.

Also: for a long time it seemed Linux adoption was also lower in less wealthy countries as using unlicensed versions of Windows are much more accepted there.

[pjmlp]

I would say that its adoption was mainly driven by iOS development, the meme of Year of Desktop Linux hardly coming true as the desktop story keeps being rebooted every couple of years, and the fact that many folks don't really care about GNU/Linux per se, any POSIX environment will do just fine.

As it turns out, the remaining 78% users (taking out the usual 2% from Steam surveys) that cared about POSIX tooling, were happy to use SUA, cygwin, mingw, Virtual Box, VMWare for their needs, and now have WSL in the box anyway.

[eitland]

> I would say that its adoption was mainly driven by iOS development, [...]

That is an extremely good point that somehow escaped me.