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.
How is that not 95%?
Lots of shitty techs are afraid of the command line. Lots of companies also just have an AD server and nothing more these days.
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.
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.
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.)
That’s why they EEE’d LDAP: vendor lock-in. It’s MS.
Nah - that’s not the reason. And the companies that «just have an ad server» has most of their stuff in the cloud and at saas providers. Those servers are not «ad servers».
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.
Some stuff is designed for windows and we have to support it.
Other shops are windows shops
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.
iirc Netflix or something uses bsd
Some people are still used to 100% windows at work and take that home, I guess.
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/server-operating-system-market
It depends on how you collect the data