Please don’t insult people based on something as subjective as the OS they decide to use. That’s completely unnecessary to make your point regarding VMs and doesn’t have that place on HN.
I know hating on Windows is popular and I myself detest what Microsoft is doing to their operating system, but Windows is still a better OS than its competition for most people. This is reflected in its worldwide market share.
Windows can actually be managed by am IT department and has a massive security ecosystem. If a corporation with more than ten people has to deal with my data, I'd much rather see them use Windows than anything else.
Also, for every AD/GPO key on security there are 2000 ways either overriding them or doing huge harms with Office macros, OLE calls, VBscript, OCX compat calls and so on.
And yet useless because 90% of compability modes will send such security to /dev/null.
Office macros, OCX, Active X compat plugins for IE11 (they still are), VBA, VBScript executions, screensavers as they stated, drop-in replacement DLL's, security overrides because that w9x doesn't work with admin rights...
And so on.
WinNT would be secure if MS ditched Office Macros (or at least hard-sandboxed them) and ran all w9x software on seamless VM's.
Pretty hot take considering Windows Server is still incredibly popular especially in stuffy fortune 500s. It's also an acceptable OS for people who are less technical, or have a specific requirement to be on Windows. I would argue mechanical engineers are very smart and yet they are stuck on Windows because CAD software is stuck on Windows (no, FreeCAD isn't enough remotely good enough). There's also a lot of bespoke locked-with-dongle stuff that only runs on Windows as well. Video games almost exclusively run on Windows. At least until Proton really takes off.
I suppose you may not be very experienced. Windows is actually pretty powerful. I am a full time Linux user and still miss how convenient installing things like drivers, weird software, etc was on Windows. I just can't stand the new spyware angle they've taken their consumer offering. It's not hard to configure Windows to be safe and Microsoft is often times better than many linux distros about pushing patches.
A decade ago this was true but today this is utter bullshit. There is a 20% of games that are exclusively Windows, sure.
You wanna play vidya sure have a dedicated Windows box for that, no one will judge you for the Windows part specifically.
>> I am a full time Linux user and still miss how convenient installing things like drivers
If you're buying hardware that doesn't already have drivers in the Linux kernel tree, or you don't have the skills to use DKMS, you should go back to using Windows only. Please uninstall all/any Linux you have.
>> It's not hard to configure Windows to be safe
Tell us we can't take anything you post here seriously without telling us we can't take anything you post here seriously.
>> and yet they are stuck on Windows because CAD software is stuck on Windows
I have supported CAD software in business environments that had Windows OS as a dependency. We still virtualized Windows and used PCI pass through. It really wasn't that hard to set up. All the Linux, some Unix (BSD) were managed with Salt States (way simpler than AD).
With hard ramsonwares from Eastern Europe most fortune 500 will consider changing into anything non-Windows based (at least for servers and office work such as documentation and management) because of their own sanity.
Hasn't been my experience. With managed systems on azure life is fairly easy from a sysop perspective. Getting ransomware is more of a strategic problem than an operating system problem at that scale. Personally, I prefer Linux servers. But my motivations aren't the same as other companies. For example, I really don't like the idea of license fees or vendor lock-in. In exchange, however, my Linux servers take more effort to secure properly with many more foot-guns available via configuration file.
I don't. Except this isn't an uncommon opinion. There are literally tomes of knowledge (available via nostarch for example) describing firewall configuration and many other aspects of server administration. My linux desk reference is the size of an encyclopedia.The PfSense book is similarly massive (though that's more of a BSD thing).
In Windows Server's defense most common fixes are available either via console (azure) or through a series of often very simple clicks. Microsoft really nailed the user-friendly GUI-driven experience to setting up a server (mostly) safely and I think that shows in their adoption.
I am not a server admin because they aren't paid enough for all the crap they have to deal with.
A sane netfilter or pf config is like three to five lines which any noob can find with a web search, or "ufw status allow ssh ; ufw enable".
Netfilter and PF are capable of doing actual router stuff, you can just skip over that section if you want to.
The "GUI driven" argument is why businesses should just skip over hiring mediocre IT people who don't really "get" servers and just do SaaS. Kinda like how "just use GSuite" replaced all those MS Exchange ""experts"".
