I read that even Azure, which you would expect to have a ton of Windows machines deployed, is like 66%+ Linux VMs. I was surprised to hear that, but it matches my limited experience.

I appreciate your comment about my experience. Perhaps I’m not giving myself enough credit for what I know. I kind of know these things in isolation since my IRL friends, bar one or two, aren’t very technical so I have no benchmarks to compare myself with.

I did a little bit of cloud stuff in a past job. It was a mix of billing and tech support, nothing requiring a ton of experience or certs, though a general knowledge of computers and public cloud computing was needed. A lot of people who worked there did not have it so I floated to the top pretty quick. I work hard, but I don’t need the stress of being in a dysfunctional org.

I appreciate the tip about R&D and startups. I ride my bike a lot and sometimes when I go through office parks or light industrial I see boatloads of tech-ish companies that have no consumer name recognition or anything. Whether it’s R&D at a big cloud provider or something similar, the behind the scenes stuff is more likely to utilize Linux.

Oh, I’m a dummy, that joke went right over my head the first time!

I’m still looking for that ideal tie-in where I link it with something I care about. I don’t know if I want to stay in IT, but I have to do something and at least the skills will be transferable. The work from home aspect of IT has also been very good to me. I’ve outperformed at 40h/week support work while taking care of sick family members and working out of my… walk out basement.

At least I have some outdoor hobbies to bring balance to my cellar-dwelling tenancies.