this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The only (larger) enterprises that insist "we depend on Windows" are those with shitty corporate IT :)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

And several governments from various countries and at various levels (municipal, state, federal)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

there's

  1. US government, with a mandate to use Windows for the same reason that Boeing CEOs of the past decade aren't in jail for hundredfold manslaughter
  2. other governments, where again, "shitty corporate IT" applies, but with s/corporate/administrative

Even worse: governments using Windows are absolutely giving the US services direct access to all their confidential files & communication.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It's an adoption problem. My company only supports windows because all our customers use windows. All our customers use windows because all their vendors only support windows.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Potential solutions:

  • move to web-based SW - platform-agnostic, so it's pretty easy to support other OSes (oh, and you get mobile almost for free)
  • start submitting patches to get stuff working on macOS and Linux - once the barrier to supporting other OSes is low enough, they may let you officially support it
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I get that there are solutions to the problem, but there's no way a team of 10 can port 35 years of win32 dependence and keep the business solvent. Maybe incrementally, over the course of 10-15 years. We're just now migrating off of .NET 4.8 because we use WCF so much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Depending on the implementation, WCF can be really easy to adapt to new clients. If you wanted to support Linux, macOS, or web, you just implement the part of your service that make sense for those platforms.

I obviously don't know your app at all, but it sounds like a 10 person dev team could probably build a new app in just a few months since the backend is already there. It wouldn't have all of the features, but generally speaking it's a lot easier to rebuild an app than refactor an existing one. Whether that would bring value is another concern entirely.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago

That's why I put the (larger) there - if you are a small company maybe you can not keep up a separate office infrastructure from your deployment / test systems in case of SW development. If you are a large enterprise and use Microsoft infrastructure, then either the people making the decisions in IT are getting a lot of bribes, or they are really really stupid :) Or both.

And I mean that absolutely without anger against Microsoft, and purely in terms of security nightmare and waste of office productivity because using a contemporary windows system wastes so much more time of any given user that each desk worker probably loses 20-70% productivity compared to a lean operating system (and that would include something like Windows 2000 / XP).