I'm the IT guy. It's the LOB apps that require windows, not the company. Stop selling us windows-exclusive software and we can talk. Yeah, it's really cool what you can do with wine and proton these days. Can I do that to a bank teller's computer and expect the vendor to answer the phone if something goes wrong?

and honestly, windows is pretty durable these days. 'desktop stuff' is less than 5% of my timesheet and I really do have better things to be doing with my time than trying to achieve the current baseline functionality with noncooperative methods.

I don't know which world you live in, but I am pretty confident that there aren't that many HN users in my software company, even among developers

Even so people (HN or not) won't give up their productivity tool their daily work relies on because of some nuisance or really, ideal. I have seen comments where people are so pissed off by the aggressive ads in Windows that they switched to Linux or Mac, but the number is going to be very small.

Unfortunately, HN crowd suffers from the "someone, please, do something" syndrome.

(Also: "Here is how the law should look like: we all should get a raise")

Realistically what are the alternatives to Microsoft 365 with the same level of functionality?

The problem is, Microsoft is entrenched with everybody but software engineers and server administrators.

Even “IT people” - their primary domain of skill is working with Windows etc…

And Microsoft has leveraged this dominance to coerce companies into their cloud services too.

Microsoft is a lich, it can’t be killed. It just has to be managed around.