🐧 After 12 years in a Windows-free environment, my company won't support Linux anymore.

TL;DR Microsoft is tacking back the user base they lost with Balmer, and we are not really doing anything to fight back.

I've been "illegally" using Linux, in my job, since 1999 till 2010, fighting with Exchange, Active Directory, proprietary softwares, corporate surveillance, and hate.

Finally at the end of 2010 I've moved to a company where they forced everybody to move to Linux (great!!!), and these last 12 years I didn't touch a Windows computer, except some servers, in and outside my working time.

One year ago my company split, and I'm now in a new company that is Microsoft partner. They suddenly decided to drop support for Linux and later for Apple.

As I'm not a fighter anymore, I've migrated to Windows, trying to be positive about it, and here comes troubles!!!

Same limits, bugs, tips&tricks, and usability experience as 12++ years ago. While there are some additions, like WSL, and material design, I really cannot find any pleasure to work in such environment. My workflow is totally broken.

There's only one thing that works way better on Windows, and it's the HiDPI support. Here Microsoft has done the things right (KDE is on the right track as well).

Now, the main reason of this change, is costs reduction. My company is also moving away from different services and home made applications (more than 1500), to use only, when possible, SaaS provided by Microsoft. Only one provider worldwide can get huge discounts.

Companies like SUSE, Red Hat and Canonical don't have such offer, or are not as usable as the one of Microsoft. Even not Apple is competitive in this sense.

20 years ago the Office ecosystem was our main enemy ( second to the hardware support), today again Office is winning and causing this migrations to happen.

It's more complex than that, but I think we must fight back and work more for whole solutions.

Red Hat is more focused on the server and cloud solutions, but Canonical and SUSE may be big players for the enterprise adoption. How can we drive a change?