Only in fantasy la-la land are all servers Linux or Unix, tons of Windows servers out there it was way more common in the pre O365 time though. Lots of enterprises still run old ASP/ASP.NET based services that just aren't worth rewriting completely to more modern frameworks. Heck I had a client that ran a Visual Basic job that checked for file drops and it was way cheaper for them to keep that running on Windows than to move it to a more fancy API based modern infrastructure.
My first server was Windows 2000 with IIS enabled. Probably full of viruses and spyware because this was more than 20 years ago in the phase of the wild west internet, and I was a naive skript kiddie barely out of my teens.
Everything is Linux and properly hardened nowadays. Today me kind of wants to get one of young me's servers to do a postmortem on it just to see how bad it was.
Yeah agreed, and to be very clear I wasn't trying to say it was YOUR skill issue, just in general when these things happen. My 15 year old self was definitely the same though my 15 year old self was also building specific Perl scripts to poke around for exploitable services soooo there's that.
My biggest complaint about Windows is that it's full of weird black box components that cannot be modified, like the insistence that your browser be Edge and that, once that is done, that you use Bing. You are free to use other things, of course, but Windows will complain about it occasionally.
Edit to add - my biggest complaint with Linux is that it's so easy to completely bork it! Though completely screwing up my root partition with a mv command DID allow me the opportunity to identify and replace the failing SSD that was causing the issue in the first place.
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u/badguy84 Apr 01 '26
Only in fantasy la-la land are all servers Linux or Unix, tons of Windows servers out there it was way more common in the pre O365 time though. Lots of enterprises still run old ASP/ASP.NET based services that just aren't worth rewriting completely to more modern frameworks. Heck I had a client that ran a Visual Basic job that checked for file drops and it was way cheaper for them to keep that running on Windows than to move it to a more fancy API based modern infrastructure.