[Mashiro]

Sadly for me nothing can really properly replace Windows on a Desktop. I have used and tried out many different Linux distributions made to be used with a Desktop (you know the ones with a GUI and so on) and I have used Mac OS for several months. Neither Linux nor Mac OS (Unix) can replace Windows for me due to lack of many useful applications or simply because the alternatives are a joke. I actually don't use that many tools on my personal computer but if I can't use the few tools I have on Linux or Mac without having to hack around or use some Wine stuff... No, thank you I'm not going to use Linux nor Mac OS as my main OS. I did try alternatives of my applications and while some are good others are a big joke. Talking about old and outdated software with a very limited feature set. Absolutely putting off...

Mac OS keyboard is annoying as hell and in general it has many annoying aspects. Probably because I'm to used to Windows but honestly if you can't type things like [] or other widely used characters nowadays without having to press tons of buttons... yeah... no... absolutely not going to enjoy such keyboards. And application support on Mac OS is horrible compared to Linux or Windows. Things that work on old Windows version will work on newer ones and in many cases also backwards... Linux even much better in that terms. Mac OS is pretty stupid. You have a Mac OS version that is a few versions older and it gets labelled as unsupported and the worst is you cannot upgrade because well... Apple dictates that I cannot upgrade a Mac Mini Mid 2011 to something newer than Mac OS High Sierra. And if you use patches to do the upgrade... I don't recommend it. I did it once. It worked for Mojave but it was not really usable due to them dropping drivers for the older ATI (AMD) GPUs they used in 2011. And the version after Mojave was a disaster that made me spent several days looking for reinstallation media for High Sierra and how to get it running (simple trick: set the time in the installer back to a date before the release of High Sierra). Ended up reinstalling the whole thing because it was stuck in a bootloop after the upgrade to whatever came after Mojave with a patcher. Again no problem with Windows or Linux in this terms. Overall Apple products and their software isn't made to be really friendly to the environment in many different ways (no matter what they preach to you).

Actually what comes close to replacing Windows would still be Linux (Debian / Ubuntu / Mint Linux). And If I wouldn't play games I probably would use Linux as there most things work and the only application that doesn't work is something I can thankfully get running with Wine easily without much hassle or dirty hacks. I did use Linux as my Desktop OS several times in the past but it has had its downs that made me go back to Windows.


On servers I would use / actively use Ubuntu Server LTS version or Debian. Why? Well, not much to say. I've grown up using Ubuntu 6.X and later moved on to Debian 6. I know both distros well. They're both pretty much the same under the hood and with their tools. Easy to manage, stable and very robust (Debian more than Ubuntu).

However even here Windows Server is something that you cannot really replace. I'm talking "business". AD, DNS, printing and etc. inside companies. All of that is based on Windows Server and other Windows products. That is how Microsoft makes its money with business customers. Private customers who get Windows for free today are just peanuts for Microsoft. Business customers, O365 and Azure is the real deal for Microsoft.