On Mon, 12 Dec 2022 14:38:16 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'Anyone remember the high-end commercial UNIX workstations from a few decades ago — like from companies like IBM, DEC, SGI, and Sun Microsystems?'
What was it that made them “workstations” as distinct from “highly-specced PCs”? To me, it was the fact that they offered both client-style and server-style functionality in a single box. Microsoft killed off this market with Windows NT. But their “NT Workstation” desktop product was carefully crippled to avoid offering any serious server-style functionality; for that you had to pay extra (a lot extra) for “NT Server”. Somehow the customers were persuaded to accept this deal, moving to a less-functional desktop platform for less money up front, to discover that the costs for growing the system had moved elsewhere. Perhaps this was because the proprietary Unix vendors themselves were doing something similar, since they were also selling proper server machines, so they didn’t want their own workstation products to cannibalize _too_ much of this market segment. If you look at it this way, you realize that Linux is very much a full-function “workstation” OS, not a “desktop” OS. If you want to talk about “Linux on the desktop”, forget it: think about “Linux on the workstation” instead, and you realize that it completely owns that market.