this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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If you think SSO and easy profile migration doesn't save time, there's simply no point in discussing it with you. I don't like MS and their near monopoly position as a company much either. But that doesn't mean every product they make is utter trash for every situation.
There are undoubtedly other solutions but to pretend every one is too dumb to use them shows how little actual experience working in a variety of companies is.
Back in the nineties you might have had Novell NetWare or just plain old LDAP instead of AD, but unlike those competitors AD kept working and offered upgrade trajectories. And it offered decent integration with a decent mailserver (that ofcourse sucked to set up securely for outside access), and that mailserver was fantastic versus the utterly terror that was Domino combined with Notes. I don't like MS for basically forcing you to go to their cloud now, but pretending it's a bad product through and through on a functional level is just being willingly blind.
You're not wrong about it being easy to set up and use, but the reason it's still the defacto is because of its earlier monopoly. Now, they are slowly killing what made it the best Enterprise option either by its greedy licensing schemes hiding things you used to use behind new and additional licensing or breaking them with untested patches that go straight from dev to production.
All the people who bluster and huff about Microsoft's stranglehold on enterprise, education, government, etc all absolutely fail to grasp how utterly manageable Windows specifically (and MS products in general) is/are. If you're familiar with Group Policy, you know; if you're not, your really, really dont. A moderately competent Windows admin with a single Windows Server can make ten thousand Windows workstations work seamlessley in fifty countries, twenty data protection doctrines and ten languages with hundreds of customisations, tweaks, automations and deployments tailored to each combination of device/user/location, if that's what they need. I wish that was the case with any FOSS OS, but it absolutely isn't and even MacOS and ChromeOS don't come even vaugley close.
This is understandable, and also can see why FOSS would struggle, since a big part of the value is keeping the operators of the machines from doing the things they want or need to do. This is anathema to general FOSS thinking, to keep the user from doing things they would generally be empowered to do.
Which I can see as being great for the admins, but it is often maddening to be a user under that regime. For example, "officially" I must use the corporate load for my work, and it's super locked down. Problem being is the lock down makes my job effectively impossible (unable to run arbitrarily new binaries, unable to connect to services without a proper certificate, unable to add my own certificates, must get all binaries and service certificates from IT who takes 2-3 weeks to turnaround a signature). So you have a few departments resorting to that naughtiest of naughty words "Shadow IT", always looking for end-runs around the corp policy that explicitly blocks software development work because they wouldn't be able to discern that from malware.
Ours also shot us in the head, by forcing automatic updates off (because they know better how to deploy patches than Micrsoft I guess) and then there's a ransomware attack that cripples things because they didn't realize they failed to apply security updates for two years on most systems. Fortunately enough people had been manually updating to keep things going.
Not to mention that single Windows admin is paid less and a more common skill set than a more specialized skill set like Linux administrators. Paying $10k per year in licensing but saving $40k in payroll is still a net $30k savings.
And if you're hiring in a rural area specialized skillsets tend to not exist so you open yourself up to new risks of not being able to hire a replacement if needed by building something less standard
That's the defeatist attitude of a true MCSE scholar.
And your arguments have the strength of the hobbyist with the homelab he's constantly having to reinstall, not understanding why companies are so stupid to not do the same thing as him.
Funny that you mention it. Not a single reinstall since I switched my homelab to nixOS. That, and using Tailscale has made hosting your own stuff easier than ever. Microsoft and Google environments are just gross, bloated and dependant on the amateurs who still work for those graveyard companies. I spent close to 20 years working professionally on that crap and won't touch it anymore. Sorry if you're still stuck in the past.