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Comment by 5e92cb50239222b | Hacker News Reader

Most of the Wordpress developers I know are Windows users. (I don't know too many of them, but still.)

That's interesting. Most of the WP devs I encountered are deploying on old-school shared Linux hosting, like BlueHost, GoDaddy, etc. Maybe some use Windows for local dev stuff, but I doubt many deploy their "prod" there.

I think that's the issue though: You're seeing "Linux users" that only use Linux on their servers because they are somewhat forced to do so.

I would actually expect that almost all of those people use Windows or MacOS for their local development.

And those hosts often are not using up to date packages and don't even have up to date security fixes at times.

I recently moved a wordpress site I was working on from a local dev setup onto a live bluehost server and was immediately hit with a bunch of out of date package warnings. As the customer was using some cheap shared hosting service, there wasn't much I could really do about it.

That's sort of funny, as one of the remaining few value pitches for something like Bluehost (versus a $5/month vps) is "somebody else does apt-get update && apt-get upgrade for you".

Shared hoster here. More likely the app arbitrarily decided 'these versions of PHP are EOL', where the reality is that they're being maintained by a number of OS vendors.

Too many customers run really old versions of code that need older versions of PHP and so on. We can't not provide them without losing the business. We do of course, make newer versions available.

The other fun one we periodically get is customers doing PCI scans or similar and getting warnings for out of date versions of OpenSSL, Apache, etc. Nope; just backporting showing the old version numbers.

Keep in mind that WP has a vast installation base, so your local sample is not necessarily representative. I only know WP admins that a fairly comfortable with Linux and use it on a daily basis.

Not a lot of Windows in the shared hosting space. And what little there is tends to be more expensive, from what I have seen.

And, perhaps other than knowing about permissions, you don't really need any Linux knowledge to use these hosts.

Back in 1996 I had a website running on a shared unix of some sort. I could barely upload files in the correct binary/ascii mode, or copy and paste a “chmod” command.

My 1996 self would be the exact nightmare wordpress user today, although I guess I wanted to learn even though I didn’t know what I was doing, which is different to many comments I’ve seen on places like GitHub.

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