Rhetorical question:
How do you go about picking Linux for your company, school or institution?
I live next to a college with 1200 students.
They’re picking between Chrome OS, Windows and Linux for their students and teachers.
The IT department is 3 people whom will be responsible for getting everything up and running.
All students and staff are getting their personal laptop.
Which one would you pick?
The users.
First, I’d interrupt their question and tell them what they’re referring to as Linux is actually GNU/Qt/systemd/container/Linux.
Next, I’d tell them everything they know is wrong.
Oh, God, how could I have forgotten? I’D TELL THEM I USE ARCH.
/s 
But, to answer your question that you didn’t really ask, if I had 1,200 users and there were only three of us, I’d sub to G-Suite, get Chromebooks and call it a day.
On a team of 8 supporting 6,000 on Windows, that was rough. With even more limited resources I’d want something that required 0 troubleshooting. While I’ve never used ChromeOS, I understand this is the case? Just CTRL + Shift + Alt + R or something and you restore to factory settings, login to Google account, and everything is back to how it was?
Yeah, that.
Linux is just a smaller part of the greater SystemD operating system.
If Apple decides to make their macOS available to install on any hardware, even for a price, both Windows and Linux distros will have a problem.
This is my answer to the thread question.
I see you have little experience with powershell…
OK, perhaps i should clarify:
powershell on linux is missing most of the functionality because linux doesn’t include much of the functionality that powershell interfaces to.
Powershell does code signing (so you can, for example audit/bug-test a script and then deploy to your environment with a signed-code only policy, knowing that an idiot isn’t going to modify it and break it), easily handles collections of objects, import/export of collections via CSV/XML, etc, transparently works with remote machines, etc.
I’ve done more scriping and shell work on Linux than i have in windows; but i’ve used powershell enough at this point to see a good thing.
Linux guys who don’t know what they’re talking about in the windows world will continue to shit on it; in the mean-time Linux scripting will just fall further behind as guys are hacking together bash, perl and a heap of other bits of glue and duct-tape to do things you can do across thousands of machines with a csv file exported from wherever and a couple of lines of powershell.
Where’s the documentation? Does it replicate multi-site? Does it support central control of policy?
My concern with people advocating powershell as an end-all amazing thing is that they clearly don’t use Linux that much, because Bash/ZSH/python/whatever is absolutely enough to do tons of heavy lifting (as @AnotherDev said, moving 20k mailboxes) due to the way Unix was designed.
You don’t need to operate on Objects if everything is a file.
Thing is, working with objects tends to make the code much more succinct with a lot less glue garbage.
But it relies on the underlying object infrastructure across (virtually) every OS and application component which linux just doesn’t have.
A tool to fix the fucked up situation that is Windows configuration management can be called a good thing, but it’s still makeup on a pig.
I get that it’s powerful.
If you think that’s accurate, than you clearly haven’t spent much time working on Linux scripting in the last 3-4 years.
I want to change a driver,
echo "0000:00:1f.0" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/i915/new_id
How’s that done in Windows?
The problem here is conflating Windows philosophy with Unix philosophy.
Windows is monolithic and over-organized.
If you want to do something in Linux, it’s quite well organized. Just drill down into the relevant folders on /sys/
On Windows, you have to remember which administration tool, or which long and convoluted, case sensitive powershell command you need to use. I get that it’s memorization, but the fact of the matter is that in my 5 years of working on server 2008, I never memorized that shit, I always had to document and reference the docs. That simply isn’t the case on Linux.
It’s clear that this conversation is counter-productive:
I’ve never had a requirement to do that in either windows or linux.
Windows? You install the driver from the source. Enabling/disabling devices is a one-liner “enable-device” or “disable-device”.
Not a heap, admittedly. However…
You know that even powershell in server 2012 is light years ahead of what it was in 2008, right? 2016 is another major step. You know that most of the MS server apps since at least 2010 can be driven with powershell, and the GUI tools often/usually even generate/give you the powershell cmdlets to do what you just did from CLI?
Whilst i haven’t done a heap of Linux scripting in the past 4 years, what has changed?
Seems your windows knowledge is pretty out of date yourself mate.
Head -> sand
It isn’t just the OS that you need to tweak as an administrator. The OS exists to run applications. which are a mess of different config file formats, install locations, etc.
But given you’re not going to read this and just sit on your 10 year old platform knowledge i guess i’ll stop bothering to reply.
The thing I reacted to was the implied statement “there is nothing like powershell on Linux”. Which, err… is technically true, I guess, but only because you do not need powershell in that manner.
Take my desktop. It runs i3. I have a bunch of terminals in a tiled environment, and these terminals control, literally, everything on my machine. I use them to launch web browsers, I use them to run rendering jobs in Blender, and I use them for many other tasks. This is the best workflow I have found for me, and it is extremely keyboard centric. It took a long time to learn, and is impossible to replicate in Windows.
See, Powershells dirty little secret, is that Win32 apps are not compatible with it. This means programs like Photoshop cannot be used through Powershell… Unless Adobe go to great lengths to support it. On my system I can start batch rendering jobs for Blender if I need to. This is currently not possible in Windows equivalent programs.
I realise my use case is far from the norm, but Powershell, wonderful as it is, cannot hope to measure up to what Bash, python and plaintext can do at the moment. You can do a lot with it, but not everything.
Note, I am working on information from a couple of years back, which was the last time I looked at PS in earnest. If things have changed, then great! But I don’t think it does… 
Powershell is not about your or my desktop. That said, you can use it to launch applications. You can do text IO with it if you want. It can do anything any other basic scripting language can do.
However, the point with powershell is that it is intended to be able to do the one liner command you might do on your single machine and scale to tens of thousands of machines over the network with a basic for loop.
It is intended that you can write your annoying-to-author script, debug it, test it then code-sign it, and then (trivially, with import-csv or whatever) feed it all the data via XML/CSV or whatever so your helpdesk gumby can give it a bunch of shit out of a spreadsheet and run the script - without you having to worry about them modifying it and fucking the entire domain. Because if they modify it, the code signature breaks and you can enforce signed only scripting on your network.
No piping through ssh connections, no dumping config info into text files, massaging with awk/sed/grep/etc. (because say, the output from dmesg is not compatible with the input required for tool or application X to tweak widget Y).
Powershell is intended to connect to one or more objects over the network and tweak them. The connectivity is intended to be transparent.
Are there wrinkles? Yes
Is it different and awkward if you’re used to a text pipeline? Yes.
Can it do a LOT more than basic scripting, at scale without glue to work over the network: also yes.
Great!
What is the powershell command to tell Premiere to encode my videos located at place xxx in FLAC and x265?
If you genuinely care, tell me the bash commands and i’ll likely be able to translate.
(when i wake up, it’s 4:45am here and i’m going back to bed).
Token is correct!
Dealing with people at work that have almost 0% exposure to linux poses a task of selecting the proper distro thats intuitive to use and easy enough to inspire a little learning,
I ended up installing Handy linux 2 and customizing it so the guys and gals would feel comfortable using it.
Ive been retired for a year now and they are still using it.
but there lies a problem of getting hardware makers to support linux being a whole nuther animal.
while i was working in the shop I made communication cabling for our equipment and ran emulators so i could program some of the machinery using linux, but there was a limit to what i could do because of proprietary software requirements
so its kind of a moot point to ask to choose a distro
your better off with choosing a generic distro and working with your suppliers and software engineers to develop a good support base.
you could also respin a distro after you have customized it for your companies use and distribute it to your employees( using the same program they use at work makes them more familiar with it.)
its then up to you to train the employees in its use
the fact is as some else replied there are too many distros to choose from and they are radically different in their ui. (and with so much to choose from its a bit overwhelming
Fragmentation will not be a problem. The moment the desktop Linux distro rise from the mud of the other distros, that distro will be the gold standard everyone else will fall in line with. This is simply how things work in tech. So, fragmentation is a red herring.
Until that distro arrives, however… Desktop Linux will never happen. And I suspect it would cost at least a billion dollars to make the definitive desktop Linux version…
Thanks @Gnuuser, IMO my point was a double edged sword- it was that, plus maybe the users I’m dealing with are super proficient in Linux and the administration isn’t difficult if there were not customer compliance requirements (and then you make level1 news for having the next security breach).
Thats my biggest point- a lot of the Linux gurus can go back and forth here about LDAP this, Powershell vs. Bash vs. grey beard wizard spell that, but from MY enterprise (everyone’s will very) requirement, as much as I’m a fan of Linux, i shy away from it— and that is less $$$ in RHEL’s pocket.
I feel some of the replies are getting a little off topic or into the weeds, I almost want to jump into the fray but I keep re-reading the OP’s title/question. Results will vary, but why Linux isn’t going to get a lot of adoption from me- where it counts (license $$ and therefore RHEL license money to feed the dev machine and progress) is because they leave me high and dry on a lot of things. Business doesn’t want to hire more grey-beards, they want to hire young graduates that work for less and can jump into the fray and chip away, and more specifically for me, we spend bank to develop a chef build, roll-out CONOPS etc etc etc and still that magical day comes very quickly where OpenSCAP shits, various other tools sh8t, Tenable doesn’t support scans on the new build etc and we basically have to tell programs we can no longer give them that build, and their now non-compliant builds are on the chopping block. The customer is not reassured with “our best grey-beards are on it, and we have tickets in with RHEL, but crickets”. No enterprise wants to deal with that on a constant basis. If I can put a giant list of tools on a windows build but the program wants Linux, we have a long talk and Windows usually wins.
Thats just trying to answer the OP’s question and IMO my case is very niche (am I really alone here and no one else can bitch about DISA, PCI, HIPAA etc?), its probably not as relevant as many other points- furthermore if it sounds like I’m complaining I’m actually not, the hoops we jump through to support some of those Linux builds gives me some serious job security. Keep being you Linux!! Daddy wants more toys, cars, bigger house, larger retirement fund!!