On 19/05/11 20:40, John Williamson wrote:

It depends on the capital and support costs.

Windows may be cheaper overall if you need to retrain your support staff
and users to use whichever version of Linux and whichever office program
suite you use. Training for Ubuntu is not generally transferable to
Debian and vice versa. Then retrain them when Linux changes, and this
happens (On Ubuntu long term support versions, anyway) at about the same
frequency as Windows. I'd say, for a commercial operation, it's pretty
much a dead heat.

In industry the support costs of Windows and Linux machines are about
the same. It favours Linux if you have a large number of identical
machines because it's easier for one Linux sysadmin to service a large
number of Linux machines. This difference is likely to pretty much
disappear with the next release of Windows.

The real killer is having to support *both* platforms. In general you
need Windows for its desktop applications, the Linux equivalents aren't
quite ready yet. So if you decide on Linux servers you will need both
sets of skills.

That's very important if you have a relatively small IT team. If you
have hundreds of them you can afford to split your team into different
groups.


--
Bernard Peek