Ignoramus3187 wrote:

On 2009-02-05, Pete C. wrote:

Ignoramus28897 wrote:

On 2009-02-04, Pete C. wrote:

Ignoramus28897 wrote:

On 2009-02-04, Pete C. wrote:
It seems every year or so I venture into the Linux world to investigate
something, but so far I just haven't found any attraction. The bulk of
the Linux hype I hear boils down to "It's free" and "It's not Microsoft"
and neither of those hold any particular appeal to me. I'm certainly not
a big Windoze fan, but I find it does everything I need it to do, at a
modest price, I can find the applications I need for it, and it's
reliable (at least all of my Windoze installations are).

It may depend on what you are trying to do with Linux (or Windows).

I am typing this from a Linux laptop.

I run Linux at home and we are switching to Linux at work for certain
applications (all application backend stuff and some computer
programmers). The more we switch, the more other things that run under
Windows look like they could be a candidate for switching. We went
from using about 100 Windows servers to run our apps, to just over 30
Linux server, because we could load up Linux quite a bit more. It is a
stronger platform.

There are some things that work very well under Linux, some things
that work not so well. The same applies to Windows.

What works well under Linux is OS reliability, document editing, web
browsing, databases, all server stuff, networking, and, lately I would
say media playing. Linux is also extremely friendly to automation of
common tasks via scripts (such as automated backups and a myriad of
other things). It is also a very strong platform for servers.

That's an argument for *not* using Windoze as a server in the Enterprise
space, not an argument for using Linux. There are a number of OSs that
are far better suited to the Enterprise server space than either Windoze
or Linux.

Well, I am open minded. So tell mw what I do not know.

For the enterprise, I considered Linux (which I used extensively for
the last 13 years since 1995), and FreeBSD. The choice was fairly
obvious. FreeBSD is rock solid stable, but there is less support and I
was not as well versed.

Looking for a proper distro, I rejected both debian as well as
Fedora. Ubuntu server gives me everything that I look for and is every
easy to maintain. We have several dozens of servers and I manage all
of them by means of scripts. I made a practice to never log on to them
individually one by one to do anything. Everything is done via
scripted commands.

This way, the incremental "cost of ownership", as far as personnel and
administrative costs go, is zero. If they add 500 more servers,
administering them will not be any more work.

We also found them to be highly reliable, as in, none ever crashed or
misbehaved beyond out own mistakes.

So, this is a decent platform.

For enterprise class OSes try ones such as: AIX, OpenVMS, Solaris, HPUX,
etc., all OSes with mission critical level support, something that both
Windoze and Linux lack.

I heard a lot of that "mission critical" talk. I do not think that it
is worth the exorbitant amount of money, given that Linux already
gives us the reliability. We have enough scripts written for quick
failover.

Mission critical service includes such things as on site spare parts
inventory, guaranteed on-site response and system repair times, etc. All
critical systems already have multiple levels of redundancy to ensure
rapid service recovery in the event of a system loss or even a site
loss. Mission critical service isn't to ensure uninterupted service,
proper systems design ensures that, mission critical service ensures a
minimum exposure to reduced redundancy.


Where I work we have many 10s of thousands of servers (no joke), and
among those we have like a dozen Linux systems that were an experiment
in their viability in the enterprise space. That experiment was some
years ago and there has been no expansion in the Linux space, even
though the company is very big on cutting costs.

Depending on what you do exactly, which you obviously do not have to
state here, you could save a "very large" amount of money. Google can
do it.

If 30+ servers have not crashed in 6 months, that tells me that their
reliability is decent. I reboot them every week, automatically of
course, just in case.

We work to "five nines" i.e. 99.999% availability standards, so not
crashing in six months isn't enough to meet that standard. My systems
regularly run years without a crash, and do not require weekly reboots
either. The reboots during routine maintenance every few months are
plenty. The bulk of failures are transparent such as a failure of a disk
that is mirrored and automatically replaced with a hot spare so the
replacement of the failed disk is at our leisure.




Where it is not so strong is "specialized applications" like those
drag and drop specialized programs like accounting, CAD etc. BRLCAD is
a good example, everything that I have seen about it suggests that it
is very powerful (I tried it) but it is not easy to get started
with. My feeling is that if I had to use it ona professional basis, it
would be actually very fine after a steep learning curve.

The strength of Windows is that it usually comes preinstalled by the
PC manufacturer, so they iron out all hardware glitches, and it is
easy to use for simple things. Also, its strong point is a lot of
"apps" that could be easy to use, but cost money. The weaknesses are
bad security (viruses and other malware), difficulty in automation,
and lower performance.

So to each person, the choice may be different due to their
priorities.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that non-free software serves
their creators, not you. So authors of non-free software do their
utmost to limit your choices, even if it is not in your interests.

To anyone interested in Linux, I would say the best approach is to get
some cheap older PC and set Linux up on that, in parallel with
windows, and then make some effort to make it do exactly what you
want. This is a low stress approach.

That is exactly what I have done on a number of occasions, two otherwise
identical machines side by side in a "shootout" for the same
application, and in each case the Windoze machine has won the shootout.

I understand. I think that what it means for Linux people is that we
should make it better, instead of frothing at the mouth.

Perhaps one of these days it will win one on my shootouts.

If you want to try Ubuntu, I can help you set it up.

I'd need to find an application for it.

The last big shootout I did was with Linux/EMC vs. Windoze/Mach3 and
Mach3 won. That was before EMC2 was out, so perhaps EMC2 would have done
better in the shootout. In either case, I settled on Mach3 and it
continues to do everything I need and given my HSM needs, one control PC
can control multiple machines.

My home web/mail/storage server is also running Windoze, and given it's
4.5 years of continuous service without a crash and without being
compromised, it seems to be meeting the requirements just fine as well.
I am considering replacing the old Dell desktop it runs on with a little
Shuttle mini PC as I expect it would pay for itself in power savings in
about a year, as well as being a higher performance system.


igor



I recently gave a Linux PC to my friend, who had no personal computer
before (only a shared family Windows PC), and he is very happy with
it. So is my sister. I am going to set up a computer for my parents
now also.



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