Seems very low for public cloud provider.
On the other hand, there's arguably little reason to use Azure if you just want Linux; it's less mature than AWS and not generally cheaper. I suspect most Linux users have some sort of hybrid system and are using _both_.
Compared to our Linux VMs on GCP, which get millisecond sync and stay that way because NTP actually works on whatever platform they use.
It's shocking that Windows still has no proper NTP support and people are OK with their clocks being so off. Makes logging and debugging certain issues a bigger pain.
In short, there are reasons, they likely aren't ones that matter to you, but they exist (as I type this from my RHEL7 work desktop!)
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/wind...
With that being said, the typical appeal of Azure (and likely other cloud providers) are the PaaS services. Those typically do have Windows VMs sitting behind them, although we are starting to make Linux an option on most of those.
Very few people start a project using SQL Server if they're not otherwise using MS stuff.
Sometimes it's because a long time ago the service was done by a whole different set of people and now some other group has inherited it and just doesn't want to port it to something else even though everything else they use is open source. These are typically the groups who go to the Azure SQL PaaS service because they don't want to manage something that they don't really care for.
There is a ton of fragmentation out there :)
Postgres is free and usually good enough. If you are going to pay, Oracle is generally better. The ground that mssql wins for a non-microsoft shop is verrrrry small.
So somewhere down the road, even if I quit and decide to work with FOSS, for me the reason might be familiarity - which is not unlike the reason a lot of people insist on using other Microsoft products.
While I personally feel the performance of Azure is bad vs cost, and the management portal is a mess UI and performance wise, it's a decent product. Nothing like deploying your app from scratch from Git in a couple of clicks.
I also filed a support call the other day and got truly exemplary phone support within a few hours from someone who definitely knew their stuff.
Like GP said, I can see very few compelling features to adopt Microsoft's platform. Is there a killer feature I'm unaware of?
edit: clarify. And "burn, karma, burn"
I'm still a FOSS shop. The people developing all their FOSS on Macbooks using a proprietary OS are still FOSS shops too.
The world isn't black and white.
Anyway, the thing I like about Azure over AWS is that it's more organized and simpler to deal with. Azure is focused on high-quality while AWS pretty much throws spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. That's why AWS has 3 of every type of service.
Source: Am MSFT dev on the Azure side of things.
Goes to show Linux has truly become the swiss army knife of computing.
Windows is a window manager for Chrome, vagrant/vbox, putty. I even use OWA for outlook on windows.
More seriously, it's not portable and not something I want to invest in any further brain-wise. Plus you can't drive half of it with vagrant. I burned about 4 days recently learning that.
Part of the reason is very bad design of the case, but also the terrible UX of Windows 10 compared to Ubuntu. I think most Windows users would be amazed if they tried Ubuntu.
Windows 10 shows significant signs of software senility, which inevitably follows maturity.
- Loads of things in the start menu that I don't need and cannot uninstall (like XBox games).
- Unwanted monitoring which needs to be explicitly turned off.
- Forcing Edge down my throat at every opportunity.
- Automatic updates still restart computer without warning.
- Unwanted wi-fi communication even in sleep causing huge battery drain.
- Ugly appearance.
I am sure there are other things that bothered me but I already forgot. They really lost their marbles.
It's not perfect but it fixes many of your complaints including disabling stupid MS Store Apps you'll never use, turning off tracking, disabling cortana and giving you better control over updates.
Even if the manufacturer does make Linux drivers available, they frequently don't actually work with the hardware. For example, the wireless card in my laptop only has one of two antennas and the default Linux driver tries to use the wrong one. The Windows driver somehow works around that, but on Linux I'm dependent on the work of one amazing guy who makes the driver actually work: https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new