Well … 
In terms of users and complaints, there are three options for users in a commercial operations. Either you use what you’re told to use, you negotiate your own option, or you work somewhere else. I suspect there will be just the two options in Germany as per the article above as the perceived failure in Bavaria previously was attributed to not everyone switching, which introduced insurmountable compatibility issues.
So the German state in question is dropping 30,000 licenses in favour of Linux, and apparently plans (by design) to retain zero Windows installations.
It would seem that rather than be subject to users complaining, they are making a commercial decision that’s not (at least not solely) based on cost, but based on privacy and sovereignty. I don’t know much about Windows and the US government these days, but based on what I hear and from the tales of Mr Snowdon, you could see how foreign governments might not want Windows on machines containing sensitive information (!)
The choice (for foreign governments) would seem to be M$ (US) , Apple (US), or Linux, which is global and government independent … in terms of the future I would be somewhat surprised to see any foreign governments retaining Windows as their OS of choice, for the same reason as the German switch. (and the same reasons China, Russia, etc etc switched some time ago…)
I’m not sure how Windows can ever compete with this given the way online privacy appears to be headed. So whereas I can see your point of view with regards to home users (at present) , I’m not sure it applies to computers at work.
The reason we have Windows at home is typically because we have Windows at work. If / when we have Linux at work and everyone acquires some Linux skills, then I do wonder about the future for Windows in the home.
MAC, I think it may do … but that’s because Mac’s “just work”, they’re wonderful machines, you don’t actually need support like you do for Linux. I do point this out repeatedly every time I’m called down the hall to fix a problem with the house Mac (!)
One of the issues some people (like me) have with Mac’s is security. I ported some software to a Mac last year with the pre-conception that Mac security was really good. By the time I’d finished the port after a substantial peak under the hood, this perception had changed drastically. I have a nice 28" iMac on my desk here, 12G RAM and a 256G SSD. Very pretty machine. I only use it for testing however, I’m currently preferring a raspberry Pi5
I do find the support issue a little confusing and tend to ask people when the last time they called Microsoft for support was … typically the answer is “never”. I do recall trying to call them once for a company problem, probably around 2001 … I think at the time they wanted £125 just to open a ticket.
I’ve never used Azure and it seems unlikely I ever will. I also avoid GCP and AWS if I can (although historically, for work, I’ve failed miserably with regards to AWS). If I need to use some sort of cloud service tend to use Digital Ocean.
Azure accounts for < 25% of global cloud infrastructure, so everyone else will be using Linux. Even on Azure, lots of people deploy Linux to the extent that M$ have published their own Linux distro (for Azure). So the vast majority of skills out there would seem to be Linux based.
From what I can see, my perception is that;
- China mostly uses Linux
- India mostly uses Linux
- Brazil mostly uses Linux
- Russia mostly uses Linux
(from a gov’t perspective)
Not sure what percentage that is, but it would seem to be that the majority of the world’s population already run on Linux infrastructure. The majority of the World’s mobile phones run Linux. The vast majority of the World’s cloud infrastructure runs Linux.
So … I guess my argument is … given Linux does “everything” from mobile phones and IoT to mainframes, how long can M$ maintain Windows as the only bit of the Jigsaw that isn’t Linux … (?)
I also wonder how long the British government will be able to sustain headlines like this;
When they could doing it all with Open Source software for a fraction of the cost and instead spend some of the the money paying British people to provide quality support. The rest on, mm, dunno, maybe doctors, nurses, beds?
Last time I went to my GP (month ago?) there was a queue out the door and into the car park because the computers had failed and the automated check-in system was offline, and everyone was having to register with the front-desk. Not overly impressed with their (current) Windows bases systems, nor the idea that they will be working on my medical records “in the cloud” …
). There are enough differences in how similar products work - enough to sway user opinion - consider MS-Office vs Libre/Open-Office… sure, for the basic user, it’s fine, similar for the linux fans, who are happy to accept it or learn how to work around the “issues” … But most people wont, and they’ll just complain about it…
