Ethan Sholly, the driving force behind selfh.st, one of the most recognized communities uniting self-hosting enthusiasts, has published the latest results of his annual survey on the community’s preferences, collecting 4,081 responses from self-hosting practitioners worldwide.
No surprise there: Linux is overwhelmingly dominant, chosen by more than four out of five self-hosters (81%). In other words, for self-hosters operating at bare-metal, virtualised, or container-based infrastructure, Linux remains the backbone.
In fact, this result aligns closely with broader trends: according to Wikipedia, Linux holds a 63% share of global server infrastructure. Aside from the hobby aspect, most respondents said privacy was their main reason for self-hosting, which, as you know, remains one of Linux’s strongest selling points. Now, back to the numbers.
Why would anyone pay to use windows for their hobby?
What makes you think any of us are paying for it?
Evaluation version timer reset every 3 months.
6 months?
Damn 15 minutes late LMAO
Linux holds a 63% share of global server infrastructure.
How is that not 95%?
in addition to what others have said, i’d say a lot of civil infrastructure—hospitals, clinics, government facilities, etc—are locked in either because of bad politics or weird vendor lock in. my dad ran his own dental clinic, and he had to run a Windows server because it was required by his software vendor that did everything from appointment reminders, to the web portal, to billing, to showing which of your teeth were missing, to integrating with scanners or other equipment. it was shit software that looked like Windows 3.1 well into the 2020s, but it did the job and 24hr support was reliable. just an anecdote, but as a software engineer i was fascinated by it.
Linux is more than that if you dig down. Nobody is running Windows on their network infrastructure, datacenters, media devices, blahblahblah.
Linux is in almost everything you interact with on a daily basis aside from certain desktops.
Lots of shitty techs are afraid of the command line. Lots of companies also just have an AD server and nothing more these days.
In my experience as a Windows sysadmin, AD and HyperV are the big two.
I will espouse support for AD readily, it’s very good at what it does and connects with M365 with minimal setup. HyperV is also a perfectly cromulent hypervisor, but in that space, They all serve the same function and none I’ve worked with really have a killer feature that sets it apart from the others.
Active Directory is a monster. Got downvoted to hell the other day for saying there is nothing out there that comes close for managing a fleet of machines. Most of the idiot arguments revolved around thinking AD is fancy LDAP.
“Linux and Mac can do authentication!”
If one’s view of AD is that limited, we’re not having the same conversation. Cross connect AD with Powershell and Hyper-V, you have a robust ecosystem for enterprise. And there are zero issues with running headless Linux servers on Hyper-V.
Nah - that’s not the reason. And the companies that «just have an ad server» has most of their stuff in the cloud and at saas providers. Those servers are not «ad servers».
Some stuff is designed for windows and we have to support it.
Other shops are windows shops
Other shops are windows shops
This is the biggest chunk from my experience. They have it for AD, on prem exchange, then they do another for storage so why make it different. Then they need a database, so why not keep it the same? Whoopsie, need to support some locally hosted web. Another server? Let’s not rock the boat, IIS works well enough…
And it just continues from there, all MS all the way down for them.
Apache and nginx run just fine on Windows too.
And yet, not what MS shops use in the overwhelming majority of cases.
I’m talking about mid to large enterprise, from finance to legal. Changes are so slow in orgs like those that it often isnt worth it to bring up. So they dont, they just spin up another server VM on HyperV to run another instance of IIS.
Honestly it’s probably tomcat as bundled with whatever piece of junk corporate software the good idea fairy sold them this time.
oh man I used to support a product that ran on bundled tomcat. Fuck. That. Shit.
Oh if its a bundled “service” application almost definitely.
It will also have a UI reminiscent of win2k, cost a minimum of $20k to engage them for any “project” effort, and the first 3 meetings will be a waste of time over miscommunication on expected status.
Some people are still used to 100% windows at work and take that home, I guess.
It depends on how you collect the data
Unless you’re trying to practice with Windows server for work, I can’t think of any good reason to use it at home.
If you want a media box, windows used to be a really good option. Back when windows media center was a thing. Not so valuable now though.
Windows media center was really really good for live TV.
Yeah, it was how my family transitioned to digital TV. USB tuner stick + windows media center. And then MS killed it.
In other news, water is wet. (A wetting agent for you pedants)
Water is not a wetting agent. A wetting agent is something added to water to disrupt its surface tension and help it spread across or penetrate a material.
