Brian Nash <bcnjr5@???> wrote:

> It's the same with operating systems:
>
> Windows agressively claws it's way to the top, doing all it can to
> destroy competition, while Linux minds it's own, content to let it's own
> merits speak for it.

There's more to it than that.
Windows, like Linux/SystemD is trying to do, makes "simple things simple" so that installing a working server is largely a matter of randomly guessing which buttons to click and typing a few things into text boxes. This it adds a veneer of "simplification" to what is still complex underneath.
Trouble is, when that random button clicking fails, the "admin" is then left in a technological wasteland, without proper maps, and with a toolbox of hard to use tools - seriously, people criticise Linux for having to use command line, yet Windows has a lot of command line tools, just really horrible ones !

So a lot of the reason for Windows being popular is the veneer of it being easy to use. But under the hood it really isn't, and it's a lot harder to work with than an equivalent level in a typical GNU/Linux system (I've had to do a bit, and watched others at work).

And the biggie - doing lots of things "well enough" for people to accept them. Often, doing nothing particularly well, but well enough.

And of course, when things go wrong, not only are the tools harder to use, but useful information is either not available or completely obfuscated - e.g. special program to read the logs, one entry at a time by clicking on the item in a list. Hmm, doesn't SystemD eschew plain text logs by default ?
Such is the difficulty of finding out what went wrong and how to fix it, that we have the standard "wipe it and re-install it" approach to fixing problems.

My summary is :
Windows makes easy things easy, and hard things impossible.
Linux makes hard things doable, though easy things may need a bit of work too.


PS - I had problems with SWMBO's laptop.
C.f. the recent bootloader thread ...
Grub is really open and helpful in comparison to the Windows bootloader where the error message is "something went wrong" and there's really f**k all help in fixing things (wipe and rebuild).