[pjmlp]

Because it offers VMS niceties that UNIX clones still doesn't do, and stuff like AD, SMB, without manually going through configuration files stored somewhere, that differ across UNIX flavours.

Although I do conceed UNIX has won the server room and Windows Servers are mostly about AD, SMB, IIS, Sharepoint, Dynamics, SQL Server.

Naturally some of those can be outsourced into Azure services that Microsoft will gladly provide.

[minetest2048]

And to run windows only apps like some embedded toolchains. Although that gives a motivation for us to move on to gcc because windows is annoying to be used on CI/CD and gcc is good enough compared to that other toolchain

[ch_123]

Which VMS niceties does it offer?

[pjmlp]

Proper file locking, asynchronous operations across everything, ACL based security, proper ABI.

Not being an OS from C to C as the main programming model.

And then on top, multiple levels of sandboxing, including virtualization of drivers and kernel modules.

Ah and RDP is much nicer than X Windows or VNC.

[jmalicki]

Other than possibly proper ABI, and yes a tiny handful of file operations that could theoretically block not available through io_uring, like ioctl and splice, Linux has the rest.

[pjmlp]

In security? Not really, unless you are doing immutable deployments with rootless containers, no shell access, which at the end of the day isn't UNIX any longer.

And which Linux exactly? Plus unless you're doing C or C++, most likely aren't using those APIs.

Anyway, the differences of bare metal servers don't matter in the days of cloud where the actual nature of the kernel running alongside a type 1 hypervisor hardly matters to userspace.