As for Windows in general, 90% of the Windows servers I see fall into one of the 2 categories: 1) they run some Windows-only software or 2) the sysadmins at the company know Windows, so that's what they use. If your company relies on something from 1), you're very likely also going to fall into 2).
Specific example: a company wanted to allow any employee to log in from any computer and be ablr to get work done. A VM terminal server was too heavy for their network and server budget and they already had decently powerful PCs, so they went with AD and that roaming accouts thing. They had to hire a Windows server sysadmin to manage it.
When they decided they also needed a good NAS, web server and backup system, they already had a Windows sysadmin on staff and the licences+over-spec required to run in on Win were still cheaper than hiring another sysadmin.
The last time I was assessing Windows remote * for performance, VNC* implementations with a mirror driver provided far better performance than vanilla RDP.
https://github.com/Ylianst/MeshCentral
It has a free instance here
In the beginning they needed AD because business is heavily Windows centric.
Then they started using Windows Server for DNS, business apps, shared volumes, etc...
After I joined I started separating concerns / reducing blast radius and now we use Windows Server for AD and a few apps that are Windows only.
Azure AD + Intune MDM is getting better and I think we will be able to kill our managed AD soonish though.
I'd love to hear about alternative solutions that don't require Windows, and still spit out colour-accurate CMYK indesign files; the printing shops won't accept anything else.
Most printing shops I've had to treat with will also accept PDFs, is that the case? Because then, there's a case to be made for converting your templates to HTML (gives you access to a huge amount of tooling) and printing them to a PDF through a headless browser instance (like pptr.dev). That has worked for me in the past, and is accessible and good quality (though I did not need accurate CMYK, so YMMV).
(Though browser-based PDF isn't a panacea either. We've got one customer whose 250 page technical manual needs between 40 and 70 minutes to generate through paged.js and Chrome… They're fine with running it as an overnight job, but it's still painful to watch.)
The cost ended up being around 1€/hr when the instance was on, and 0.06€/day for the storage. I am sure this could be optimized (e.g. use snapshots and spot instance) - but I just couldn't be bothered to. For me it is worth it.
Seems that it would work quite well for turn based games (including auto save)
Stadia, GeForce NOW, Xbox Game Streaming and PlayStation Now: I've tried them all, and GeForce NOW specifically is very good. But, they only allow me to play a subset of my large pre-existing game library, and/or make me buy games again, which I'm not interested in.
Stadia is specially bad at this, having to purchase on a game-by-game basis, not being compatible with any existing ecosystem (Steam, PS, Xbox have cloud saves and friend lists), and then trusting Google to run my game forever on their servers after paying a one-time cost.
It barely worked in their web client but the desktop client worked pretty well.
Less the legacy use-case than how do we integrate everything with everything.
Additionally lots of enterprise shops, despite what HN crowd thinks, are mostly on Microsoft stacks, so that .NET application is going to connect to other APIs and stuff not available on GNU/Linux.
Then, many companies use VMs as desktops for contractors, you are just not allowed to plug anything on their network, so you are using Visual Studio via RDP/Citrix.
As an example, in life sciences most of the laboratory hardware only has APIs available via COM/.NET Framework.