The point of an OS is to run apps. Given a headless machine, which windows apps would you be interested in running and why would you chose windows over linux? About the only reason in the past has been IIS and MS SQL Server. With .NET core and linux sql server, what reasons are left? An affinity for command.com?
There's a lot of enterprise server-side software that, for better or worse (I'd argue worse), was only developed for Windows Server and will probably always only be developed for Windows Server. So at the very least you'll need some Windows VMs to run these (or maybe Wine, but it's highly unlikely to receive any sort of enterprise support that way, which is kinda the point of using enterprise software).
The good news is that a lot of it is written in CLR-based languages (particularly VB.NET and/or C#), so porting to cross-platform versions of .NET (e.g. .NET Core, .NET 5+, Mono, etc.) is at least theoretically feasible if developers can be assed to do the porting. Barring a solid business case for it, however, it's unlikely.
Point one is that "apps" are a new fangled term for the type of program used by shims over Operating Systems.
Point two is that an Operating System is supposed to operate a system, with or without users. Embedded systems frequently operate without any user input.
Win10 has an IoT version (for some reason), so I assume _some_ people find a use case for it.
In summation I cordially disagree with your assertion, with provided reasons.
> Win10 has an IoT version (for some reason), so I assume _some_ people find a use case for it.
A lot of industrial equipment has embedded control computers running Windows CE. Prior to Windows CE, DOS and Windows 3.x were also popular choices. Go back 20-30 years ago, Linux was much newer and so you can understand why a lot of vendors felt more comfortable with Microsoft's solution. Now Linux is more mature and a more viable option, but many vendors are used to Microsoft-based development and are happy to stick with it.
Microsoft is phasing out Windows CE, but Windows IOT is the simplest migration path for those vendors. Porting software from CE to mainstream Windows is generally straightforward, since the CE APIs are largely a subset of the mainstream Windows APIs; a lot simpler than porting to a completely different platform like Linux.
(Windows 10 IOT comes in two versions – Core, which is a stripped down Windows 10 with various components removed; Enterprise, which is basically the same as Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, but with a different licensing model.)
Why would you skim the web, when there are manpages? OFC their quality and usefulness varies, depending on UNIXoid platform.
From my point of view this skimming the web for documentation started with/came from the countless Microsoft users. One still don't need to skim the web with good manpages.
