posted 4 years ago
You'd have to ask the people who make those decisions. But I can venture a couple of reasons, and they're basically the reasons I myself used to decide that way.
1. Infrastructure. The Unix™ family of operating systems (includinf Linux) were designed for minicomputers and from the ground up as multi-user operating systems. This is already halfway to server infrastructure, since most servers on the Internet expect many users and thus can gain part of their specific multi-user properties from the underlying OS services. DOS and Windows were originally designed as single-user systems. It required major architectural changes get get to where they are today, and even today, a Windows machine can only be truly multi-user - or at least resemble multi-user if your buy Citrix.
2. Since Unix came from a background with close ties to commercial and academic communities, Unix machines were likely to be placed in computer labs as mini-computer systems. Students are well-known for pranking, and since on student's prank is destruction of another student's major research project, security was crafted into Unix very early on. Windows, again, was a single-user OS so that wasn't an issue, and it prioritized convenience over security for most of its early life, having to add on security later rather than baking it in.
3. Cost. Linux is "free". You can pay for support, but Red Hat's per-server prices are reasonable, so executives can have someone to yell at when things go wrong (known in the industry as a "neck to choke"). But if you are too cheap or too broke, you can download and install a free distro like CentOS or Debian and pay nothing. Of course, that means when things do go wrong, you also have no vendor to contact, but I've been sour on commercial vendor support ever since I started getting "Your call is very important" and 30-minute waits and/or direction to support sites where after a 12-hour delay you could get back canned "help" in bad English. A lot of open-source software is both more user-friendly, and better-supported than the expensive commercial legacy products. Windows is never "free", When it comes pre-installed on a new PC, the license cost is part of the cost of the PC. And when you scale up to many machines, per-machine costs can really add up.
4. Product development. A lot of the products developed for modern Enterprise use have been created by private individuals and they more often than not have been working on cheap hardware and Linux or BSD Unix, Aside from rhw reduced hardware and OS costs, the toolset available for development is much richer there than on Windows, where a comparable set of tools is either unavailable or have to be purchased (or license) piecemeal, Windows doesn't have as strong a tradition of truly free software.
5. Support, Since so many enterprise products are developed on Unix-family platforms, Windows users often suffer from platform differences. Not all Unix services are available for Windows, not all developers are as capable of supporting Windows as they are the OS that the product was developed on.
6. Ecosystem. Linux/Unix support a lot of resources that are more or less universal whether you're running Red Hat Linux, NetBSD or MacOS. Windows .Net architecture is primarily Windows-only. Yes, there's Mono for Linux, but relatively few people trust Microsoft after what they tried to do to capture Java.
7. Future. Windows is rather notorious for breakage. I know people who invested heavily into shiny Windows technologiues like ActiveX and regretted it. While not limited to Windows (CORBA was a failure on all platforms), Microsoft is the one and only support for Microsoft technologies, and if they get bored, you can end up in big trouble. Even the user experience is treacherous. It's a standing joke with me on every new release of Windows - "where it the 'Network Neighborhood' now, and what did they call it this time?" Windows gets its revenue from new sales, so like automobiles, it has to look different to attract customers even if it doesn't act that differently. Otherwise who would pay for an upgrade? Worse yet, Windows 10 has been a rolling distaster, wher the first question you ask is "OK, what did they break now?" Linux releases changes only when they're ready and strives for compatibility. As Richard Stallman likes to say, "it's GNU Linux!" and actually that's not any more correct than just saying "Linux". A Linux machine contains a Linux OS, a whole lot of GNU support software and a lot of non-GNU stuff as well. Since this aggregation gets packaged up by multiple suppliers to provide all the distros we know and love, great care has to be taken to make sure that all of the parts remain compatible. Sometimes they even are.
Education won't help those who are proudly and willfully ignorant. They'll literally rather die before changing.
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