Linux

Short answer: yes

Long answer: yeeeeeeeeees

My household is a Microsoft free environment. There is no place for the royal we in this conversation.

No. If everyone were on Linux and there was a breaking change introduced by a third-party there would be similar problems.

The problem is that critical infrastructure isn't treated like critical infrastructure. If something you rely on can go down due to a single point of failure, maybe don't fucking use it?! Have backups, have systems that can replace those systems, have contingency! Slapping Windows on to a small machine and running some shitty Chromium app to work as a cash register is a fucking stupid idea when you consider that it is responsible for your whole income.

The problem was never Windows. It was companies that were too cheap to have contingency, because an event like this was considered extraordinary and not worth investing in.

It's nice that major news outlets are saying what we nerds have been screaming for the past two decades. Microsoft only shares a small portion of the blame for the recent outage (they could have built their OS better so software vendors don't feel the need to use kernel modules, but the rest is on CrowdStrike) but we are too depenent on them.

Imho. We are too laissez faire about our dependence on computers.

Currently doing disaster planning for compliance. What I really want to put in the docs is “If power or internet goes down we are just fucked. No planning needed. “

Yes.

Entire companies and (worse) government depending on a single vendor knows for it's 30 year long history of attitudes like "we before our customers" and "well tell you anything to sell you, but well barely do the basics on our products" and"we'll make sure we're compatible with nothing, going as far as sabotage, so you can't escape our greedy claws" is a very bad idea (tm). Forcing customers and citizens to use that crap is even worse.

With Linux ( and the open source world) you have an open System that has been independently verified by millions, you have actually inter system compatibility oozing out of the wazoo. You have vendors selling software that you can actually rely on.

Wouldn’t it be wild if all government work was located in Microsoft’s M365 services? Like imagine all government data living on a SharePoint site on an E5 M365 tenant. Like if every single citizen processing service was a PowerApps application? Imagine what would happen if Microsoft had an outage or a hack?

How easy would it be for a foreign adversary to take out a country by only focusing its attacks on a single company? Gosh what a hellscape that would be.

Yea.

The only answer: y e s

I don't like the implied false dichotomy between opening up the kernel and better security. You can definitely have both. Otherwise it's a good report.

Yes we need variety. Imagine if all cars were from the same brand ..

"We", no. "Too many", yes. In general, hard dependencies on proprietary software or services are often overlooked or ignored as potential future problems. Recent examples of this are Microsoft and VMware. Once the vendor changes things so that you don't like anymore, or drives up prices like crazy, you'll quickly realize that you have a problem you can't solve other than switching, which you might not even be prepared to do short-term.

The Windows world now experiences this because Microsoft is no longer interested in maintaining a somewhat quality operating system, they are mostly interested in milking their user base for data, and don't hesitate to annoy or even disrupt their user base's workflows in a try to achieve that goal.

Many Windows users are currently looking at Linux because of this, but the more your whole workflow is based on dependencies to proprietary Windows-only software, the harder your time to switch will be. If you still use Windows today, you should at least start using more open source or cross platform software, which also will work on Linux, because you are on a sinking ship and there will probably be a time when you can't take MS' BS anymore and want to switch. Make it easier for you in the future by regarding Linux compatibility in the hard- and software you use today.

I think the issue has more to do with the "cloud"

Well, as long as you have prepared a backup system then you should be fine. Like dual booting into Linux

I deal with whole I.T support companies built on the Microsoft partnership platform. All their dev is c#, servers are windows, no concept of other os when it comes to support. It's a real basket of ms eggs situation.

Yes. All world uses the weird os that is incompatible to everything else. Which makes transition of propietary software even harder.

while True:
        print("yes") 

Cant use tab as I'm on a phone

i'm not!

Nah, I'd be completely fine if M$ went bankrupt and stopped developing Winblows altogether.