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Self-Hosters Confirm It Again: Linux Dominates the Homelab OS Space (linuxiac.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/selfhosting@slrpnk.net
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cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/38030158

Ethan Sholly, the driving force behind selfh.st, one of the most recognized communities uniting self-hosting enthusiasts, has published the latest results of his annual survey on the community’s preferences, collecting 4,081 responses from self-hosting practitioners worldwide.

No surprise there: Linux is overwhelmingly dominant, chosen by more than four out of five self-hosters (81%). In other words, for self-hosters operating at bare-metal, virtualised, or container-based infrastructure, Linux remains the backbone.

In fact, this result aligns closely with broader trends: according to Wikipedia, Linux holds a 63% share of global server infrastructure. Aside from the hobby aspect, most respondents said privacy was their main reason for self-hosting, which, as you know, remains one of Linux’s strongest selling points. Now, back to the numbers.

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[–] 17 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I'm actually surprised 19% of homelabbers chose windows, lol.

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    • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    The question is kind of flawed, though. They list Linux, a kernel, in a list of OSes.
    Either just list kernels, Linux, BSD, Windows NT, etc; or just list OSes, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Trunas, Windows Server 2025, Windows XP, MacOS, etc.

    Mixing the two together just creates weird results. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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    41 comments in c/linux@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 82 points 11 months ago (23 children)

    Linux holds a 63% share of global server infrastructure.

    How is that not 95%?

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  • [–] 52 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    Lots of shitty techs are afraid of the command line. Lots of companies also just have an AD server and nothing more these days.

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    In my experience as a Windows sysadmin, AD and HyperV are the big two.

    I will espouse support for AD readily, it's very good at what it does and connects with M365 with minimal setup. HyperV is also a perfectly cromulent hypervisor, but in that space, They all serve the same function and none I've worked with really have a killer feature that sets it apart from the others.

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  • [–] 19 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Active Directory is a monster. Got downvoted to hell the other day for saying there is nothing out there that comes close for managing a fleet of machines. Most of the idiot arguments revolved around thinking AD is fancy LDAP.

    "Linux and Mac can do authentication!"

    If one's view of AD is that limited, we're not having the same conversation. Cross connect AD with Powershell and Hyper-V, you have a robust ecosystem for enterprise. And there are zero issues with running headless Linux servers on Hyper-V.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago*

    I have no experience in sysadmin work, but have some understanding of the Linux tools used. Can you eli5 what exactly is it that AD does? (Feel free not to, I just couldn't find a good article, so decided to ask.)

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    I will espouse support for AD readily, it’s very good at what it does and connects with M365 with minimal setup.

    That's why they EEE'd LDAP: vendor lock-in. It's MS.

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago*

    in addition to what others have said, i’d say a lot of civil infrastructure—hospitals, clinics, government facilities, etc—are locked in either because of bad politics or weird vendor lock in. my dad ran his own dental clinic, and he had to run a Windows server because it was required by his software vendor that did everything from appointment reminders, to the web portal, to billing, to showing which of your teeth were missing, to integrating with scanners or other equipment. it was shit software that looked like Windows 3.1 well into the 2020s, but it did the job and 24hr support was reliable. just an anecdote, but as a software engineer i was fascinated by it.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    Some stuff is designed for windows and we have to support it.

    Other shops are windows shops

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  • [–] 20 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    Other shops are windows shops

    This is the biggest chunk from my experience. They have it for AD, on prem exchange, then they do another for storage so why make it different. Then they need a database, so why not keep it the same? Whoopsie, need to support some locally hosted web. Another server? Let's not rock the boat, IIS works well enough....

    And it just continues from there, all MS all the way down for them.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    Apache and nginx run just fine on Windows too.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    And yet, not what MS shops use in the overwhelming majority of cases.

    I'm talking about mid to large enterprise, from finance to legal. Changes are so slow in orgs like those that it often isnt worth it to bring up. So they dont, they just spin up another server VM on HyperV to run another instance of IIS.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Honestly it's probably tomcat as bundled with whatever piece of junk corporate software the good idea fairy sold them this time.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Oh if its a bundled "service" application almost definitely.

    It will also have a UI reminiscent of win2k, cost a minimum of $20k to engage them for any "project" effort, and the first 3 meetings will be a waste of time over miscommunication on expected status.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Also a proprietary license server that has to run on a machine image they provide OR they manage, in your prem.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    And for stupid reasons needs to run a connectivity check to google, amazon, and microsoft or it throws an error.

    Apparently I'm missing something that has netted them an absolute fortune. Or they are (cough morals cough).

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Linux is more than that if you dig down. Nobody is running Windows on their network infrastructure, datacenters, media devices, blahblahblah.

    Linux is in almost everything you interact with on a daily basis aside from certain desktops.

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    • [–] 47 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Unless you're trying to practice with Windows server for work, I can't think of any good reason to use it at home.

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    If you want a media box, windows used to be a really good option. Back when windows media center was a thing. Not so valuable now though.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Windows media center was really really good for live TV.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, it was how my family transitioned to digital TV. USB tuner stick + windows media center. And then MS killed it.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    Haha, same.
    Had a dual tuner pcie card.
    Had a great library of recorded movies, had it all set up to rip DVDs, photos were backed up to it and a slideshow album was set as the screensaver.
    I just missed the netflix integration, and there was never any decent replacement for that unfortunately.
    It was glorious.

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    • [–] 50 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    Why would anyone pay to use windows for their hobby?

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  • [–] 31 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    What makes you think any of us are paying for it?

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    • [–] 14 points 11 months ago* (3 children)

    In other news, water is wet. (A wetting agent for you pedants)

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Water is not a wetting agent. A wetting agent is something added to water to disrupt its surface tension and help it spread across or penetrate a material.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Can't win. (actually in your camp, last time I got the wetting agent thing...whatever Ima gonna use sky is blue. Or black, sigh. fscking internet. ;} )

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    Water is statistically extremely likely to be wet. Its almost certainly in contact with other water molecules, and therefore wet :)

    I used camp on the "water isn't wet" side, but I think this is even funnier, and dunking on pedants makes my pedantry superior /j

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    • [–] 6 points 11 months ago

    Because innovation dies the minute licensing gets involved.

    My workplace runs several VMMs for clients (ESXi, Hyper-V, etc) - because each Windows guest system needs licensing and has costs, clients spin up as few as possible, shooting the advantages of having services partitioned off right in the foot.

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    [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    The only machine I have that ever runs cracked Windows Server is a dedicated box for a Space Engineers server, because it's DS is packaged only for Windows and it doesn't run correctly in wine or proton yet.

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