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babarock

Between this and their Azure Sphere product, Microsoft may very well be the largest Linux vendor today.

As someone who discovered Unix in the early 00s, this makes me chuckle. What a world!

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They were possibly the largest Unix vendor in the 80s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

Define "largest" in the right way and that might be true, as the market was very fragmented, but certainly not in terms of market share.

I doubt they would be larger than AWS, specially for Linux.

Between Azure and WSL Microsoft might be shipping more Linux kernels than any other company out there.

Do you think WSL counts if not enabled?

Optional OS features are stored in WinSxS in case users decide to enable them, so technically they are shipping the Linux kernel with all recent pro/enterprise installs.

I actually was thinking further on this. WSL is not a Linux kernel. In WSL1, it's a syscall translation layer. In WSL2, it's a highly integrated virtualization environment.

You do have to install a Linux distro. So the kernel's not shipping, just an environment in which a kernel can be installed.

more than android? a year ago there were 2.5 billion active android devices, that's a bunch of linux kernels!

[edit] not to mention chromebooks and i would assume most of their consumer products (chromecasts, etc.)

GCP and the little project called 'Android' would probably make Google the leader, by far.

I think you might underestimate how many Linux kernels+userlands show up embedded in non-"computer" devices!

There are so many crappy IoT devices running unpatched Linux, that I doubt it. That is why Azure Sphere was invented, actually...but still there are so many gadgets out there running unmaintained Linux that it's insane.

Most likely but I was thinking of shipments made by a single company.

AWS has roughly double the market shared. So it is very likely that they take that title. https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou...

Yup, plus Azure had some 40-50% VMs running Windows IIRC, so unlikely to be running more linux than AWS.

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