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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

”Pex doesn't work on windows”

Oh that’s such a weird limitation.

In the early 2000’s open source hubris, next year was always the year of the Linux desktop. Since then consumer windows matured into a totally ok OS and one with the best support for graphics and C++ development at that.

Non-windows support nowadays is a fairly strong signal of a non-serious software offering if there is no obvious reason for it. And that’s totally fine, hobby tools developed by enthusiasts rock - but they are not industrial in scope as such.

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A lot of serious software offerings are only concerned with the server use case, modern servers run Linux unless there's a good reason not to, and modern windows has more than one acceptable way to run Linux binaries if you absolutely have to.

> modern servers run Linux unless there's a good reason not to

I think many people on HN would be surprised at how many orgs are using Windows servers heavily, because of their familiarity and comfort with Microsoft, or because some application requires it.

Of course they are non-tech companies using the servers internally for enterprise applications, not web servers, but there is absolutely a lot of windows server usage in corporate environments.

> I think many people on HN would be surprised at how many orgs are using Windows servers heavily, because of their familiarity and comfort with Microsoft, or because some application requires it.

I think most HN readers are well aware that there are a lot of Windows servers out there, especially in the sorts of environments where it's "The Server".

That doesn't change the fact that there are orders of magnitude more Linux servers in the world, and as the post you replied to said Linux is the default assumption. Basically every container and the vast majority of VM guests are Linux. I'd be willing to bet that more Linux servers have been deployed in the time it took me to type this post than Windows servers will be deployed this week.

I'm not trying to make the point that there is a comparable number of Windows servers to Linux servers, and I believe that going off "number of servers" is of limited usefulness. There are of course going to be far more Linux servers because they are far easier to provision, and the people managing them are generally going to be much more apt at orchestrating large fleets of small servers than the people managing Windows servers, which will tend towards larger servers with multiple purposes.

I'm simply trying to say that Linux is not the default assumption in many contexts where a lot of money gets spent on licenses and services for server software.

There are of course large contexts (tech companies and web servers) where Linux is the default assumption.

PEX was originally developed by Twitter, and was used heavily within the company.

Twitter ran primarily OSX (for devs) and Linux (for servers).

It's not that weird, because Windows is the most different of the common OS so it's the hardest to make work.

I agree though that Windows support is an important feature for a tool like this, and it's not complete without it.

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