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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious on the non-sequitur to GPU stuff? At large, running machine learning code has been easily doable in linux for a long time. Frustratingly hard, yes, but no harder than in Windows. Often more repeatable and cheaper to fan out to a fleet of machines, to boot.

Is there another aim of GPU that I'm ignoring?

Microsoft makes fine enterprise software, sadly. To know and believe that, though, you have to see what the alternatives are in the enterprise world. It is atrociously bad.

I do think Chromebooks are an interesting use case showing you don't need massive software. Schools have taken to those very well and are almost certainly competing with most enterprises for number of users and use cases.

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> Microsoft makes fine enterprise software, sadly.

Hum, no they don't. They make shit and use anti-competitive practices to push every other offering out of the market.

The fact that you only see experimental alternatives without the maturity to get any polish is caused by them destroying the competition, not the reason they won.

I meant that as a purely "backhanded compliment." The bar is rather low in enterprise software.

That said, fully fair that, even in the field, they probably rely more on bad practices to shoulder out competition than I'm crediting.

I think it's because of game development. Many devs target Windows for DirectX, since it's easier and cheaper to target one platform, and Windows dominates desktops, so you won't get gamers to migrate without that support.

There are various ways to get Windows games working on Linux or Mac, but they aren't out of the box, which is significant enough to prevent wide scale adoption.

Steam has done an amazing job at attacking this. Though, large studios don't target linux largely because they have very little financial incentive to do so.

And it is more than installed userbase, which is very real. For the major distribution targets, the devkits have a ton of resources poured into them that major studios can't ignore.

That said, still feels like a non-sequitur? I can't imagine "gaming as a target" is a concern for cloud customers. Certainly not the government?

> Is there another aim of GPU that I'm ignoring?

I'm amused that you seem to have missed what the "G" in GPU stands for. As someone who occasionally plays games, I'm a bit salty about what it did to the prices.

But that seems unrelated to Microsoft in the corporate world?

I don't see why the discussion would be limited to the Microsoft corporate world. They make the standard consumer desktop OS for the world and that's still the standard for PC gaming. Personally, I'm thrilled with where System76/Pop!_OS and Steam/Proton are these days, and that's what I use, but I think that's still far from mainstream. The Steam Deck is probably doing the most for Linux based gaming these days.

Even if you think about the corporate world, I'd imagine that there's a lot of CAD on Windows and maybe some 3D animation still? I'm not that familiar with those uses.

Most heavy CAD industries are custom. Some likely still on commercial unix platforms.

Is a bit like movie firms. The popular view is that Apple has that locked down, but that seems to only be the prosumer market. Most of the main studios have custom render farms that are probably linux based, nowadays. Studios had the motivation to not get locked into large contracts that grow based on the size of their render farm. (Incidentally, this is why Wacom has such outstanding linux support.)

That said, fair point on this not being limited to corporate. Not sure why I had that bend from the intro post. I was probably biasing it more to the topic of cloud than I was corporate, but those seem roughly related?

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