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by immibis 287 days ago
It's interesting you have to hedge it with "desktop" OS and the reason that's interesting is that desktops are mostly irrelevant.

Microsoft has their niche, which is offices. This used to be the main application of computers, but now it is just a very large niche.

The overwhelming majority of computer interactions are Android clients talking to Linux servers.

1 comments

Desktops aren’t irrelevant. Desktops run llvm and Xcode and Excel and Autocad and Blender and Premiere and After Effects and a thousand others that are absolutely essential to designing, producing, testing, and marketing the thousand complex products you use daily.

Just because lots of people use their phones primarily doesn’t mean that desktop computers aren’t responsible for producing literally trillions of dollars of shit every month. All those mobile apps? Developed and built and tested on desktops. The mobile phones themselves? Designed and built and QA’d using desktops. The payroll for the 200,000 people in the supply chain to get them to you? Desktops.

The power grid. Airline reservation systems. CNC mills. MRI machines. Mortgage underwriting. Computer factories. Pick-n-place machines. These aren’t run off phones.

You get the idea. Real business runs on real computers, still, no matter how many billions spend how many hours playing Candy Crush.