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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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People use what they use at work, because they want to use what they know, and most people don't care enough to learn to use use two different OSes.
Companies still use Windows because most companies still use Windows, and compatibility is important. And, Microsoft is slick, with professional and aggressive salespeople. And it's "safe", and the people making these decisions are old fucks who are used to Windows because that's what they've always used through their careers.
Some people use Macs at home, and are also high enough level at their company to get Apples approved as a supported product by IT, but this goes back to point #1: people prefer to use only one OS both at work and at home. When execs do get Macs approved, they tend to get approved only for management, because IT groups want to really only support one OS, and they want to hire as few people who can provide support for both OSes.
Linux doesn't even play into this game. Few executives are going to force IT to support it, and so the window of Linux desktop being an option for the drones is limited. And nobody's going to make Linux the only option. And so, most people are never going to be motivated to use Linux at home for the reason that they use it at work.
It's a different world in software development organizations, where a lot off these pressures are different, and you find more Linux, and Linux at home, and people willing to know their way around multiple OSes. But that's an edge case: most of the time the pressures of status quo hold sway.
I doubt that's a major factor. Generally you don't use some SAP or sales software at work and then go ahead and say "I want the task bar at my gaming computer at home to have the same color and menu layout". And in bigger companies the machines are pretty locked down. You can't fix the printer yourself. And thus there is no knowledge to be learned that you can take home... That's just the reason why people pay for Microsoft Office at home. Because of familiarity. But people also use the Apple software, LibreOffice or some cloud solution like Google Docs. It's split, even with - we use XY at work.
And management... I guess they do whatever they want anyways. I often don't see solid reasoning behind their decisions. I've seen it the other way round. Sometimes THEY (management people) want to implement something at work that they're familiar with from home. And it takes like 3 days of convincing that this isn't made for commercial purposes and will make everyone's day worse and generally be a bad idea... Also there is lots of lobbyism and incompetence at work. Large software companies have money to advertise. Have people at the right places. And they're successful with that. And we have the chicken and egg problem again. They've been using Windows. Their suppliers write software for their Windows. And that makes them stick with it. With some exceptions, of course. It's hard to change the infrastructure at companies anyways. All the infrastructure and applications are entangled and also the IT people generally only know one ecosystem. That makes it hard to change any one piece in the puzzle on its own. And it's also the reason why some companies still rely on obscure 30 years old software that no one is able to understand or maintain. Nobody thinks that's healthy. However, it's part of daily business for IT people.