I'm not saying that Linux is wrong or higher cost. I can't know enough to make such a claim. I'm merely saying that one cannot dismiss Windows as obviously high

I'm not saying that Linux is wrong or higher cost. I can't know enough to make such a claim. I'm merely saying that one cannot dismiss Windows as obviously higher-cost without examination. > goes into branding...which Linux doesn't have any reason to pursue. I strongly disagree, though I suspect we have a different view of what "branding" is. Branding isn't just logos and advertisements. Branding is creating a certain intuitive impression in the minds of prospective customers and partners. This can often involve serious technical investment. To give a specific example, look at the company DigitalOcean. They try to maintain a brand of "easy to get set up and learn how to do stuff". To do this, they pay people to write good tutorials and they spend a lot of effort designing their user interactions. As a result, when run into someone who wants to learn how to set something up on a Linux server, I point them at digitalocean. Yes, their branding involves some nice graphics, but it also involves solving problems for their users. Windows at times spent a lot of effort on solving engineering problems in service of their brand. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html Canonical actually spent a fair amount of engineering effort on branding for Ubuntu, but they just didn't have the resources to create a clean experience around things like wifi and peripherals (at least by 2013, when I switched to OSX).