You can make almost any job into a Linux job. Use a linux VM on your desktop to solve a problem for the company. Things change once your employer knows its essential.
I've also seen Linux make inroads in "windows only" enterprises when it became essential for performance reasons. A couple of times, towards the start of a project, windows APIs were discovered to be too slow to meet requirements:
In one case, customer needed us to send a report packet every 40ms. But even when we passed "0" to the windows Sleep() function, it would sometimes stop our program for 100ms at a time. The sleep function on linux was highly accurate, so we shipped linux. Along the way 5-6 devs switched to, or got a second PC to run linux.
In another case, we needed to saturate a 10GbE link with a data stream. We evaluated windows with a simple program:
while(1) send(sock, &buffer, len(buffer);
... but we found windows could only squeeze out 10% of the link capacity. Linux, on the other hand, could saturate the 10GbE link before we had even done any performance tuning. On linux, our production program met all requirements while using only 3% CPU usage. Windows simply couldn't touch this. More devs learned linux to support this product.
Those companies still don't require linux skills when hiring, because everyone there was once a windows guy who figured it out on the job. But when we see linux abilities on the resume it gives candidates a boost because we know they'll be up to speed faster.
I've also seen Linux make inroads in "windows only" enterprises when it became essential for performance reasons. A couple of times, towards the start of a project, windows APIs were discovered to be too slow to meet requirements:
In one case, customer needed us to send a report packet every 40ms. But even when we passed "0" to the windows Sleep() function, it would sometimes stop our program for 100ms at a time. The sleep function on linux was highly accurate, so we shipped linux. Along the way 5-6 devs switched to, or got a second PC to run linux.
In another case, we needed to saturate a 10GbE link with a data stream. We evaluated windows with a simple program:
... but we found windows could only squeeze out 10% of the link capacity. Linux, on the other hand, could saturate the 10GbE link before we had even done any performance tuning. On linux, our production program met all requirements while using only 3% CPU usage. Windows simply couldn't touch this. More devs learned linux to support this product.Those companies still don't require linux skills when hiring, because everyone there was once a windows guy who figured it out on the job. But when we see linux abilities on the resume it gives candidates a boost because we know they'll be up to speed faster.