A Personal Blog
Linux vs. Windows – IT Administrator's Perspective
The day is coming, folks. In fact, it’s right around the corner. For year, Linux has been percieved as the red-headed stepchild of Operating Systems. My guess is because of the mentality that is drilled into our heads from the day we were small children – you get what you pay for! Busienesses, CIO’s, IT managers – they all have bought into the Microsoft lie for all of these years. The lie is that the Windows OS is heftier, has more enterprise-level qualities and is familiar. Folks, I have news for you – that’s a pile of….well, you know! Of enterprise level databases, the only one not capable of running on a Linux box is MS SQL -well we didn’t see that coming now, did we? ;) In the realm of servers, the built in Linux webservers, file servers, Domain name servers, mail servers are second to none – testified to by the percentage of use in the world – all over 65%.
Hell, even the desktop is becoming as intuitive as Windows. The other day, I spent 15 minutes trying to find a simple task in Windows XP Professional. To setup the identical service on Redhat 9 took me less than 2. I realize I am the exception to the rule, but this was not the case in Redhat 8. Desktop GUI layout was still relatively hopeless.
I’ve heard the argument about training costs and there is some validity to that argument. Of course there is going to be the problem that users don’t know how to do anything in the new system. Give me a break. You can cut down on alot of this by providing an easy desktop configuration. At work, they run a batch job every few months to standardize the desktop configuration of all 4000 users – and it’s all over the network. Reality is, when users have comparable packages to what they have been used to, training costs remain low. Ximian Evolution looks pretty damn near Microsoft Outlook – at least from a user perspective – and it ties into all the major Mail exchange servers…
Training costs CAN remain low if IT managers have enough balls to challenge the status quo and buy into a much more stable, reliable, less costly system.
Aaron
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| Print article | This entry was posted by Jeremy Wright on July 8, 2003 at 10:34 am, and is filed under IT Thoughts. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site. |
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about 8 years ago
The time will soon come where xNix and Windows are simply 2 viable alternatives. I don’t ever foresee a time when one or the other is so truly dominant that it is the “only” choice.
I’d hate for there to be one choice.
about 8 years ago
KDE or Gnome is not ready for mainstream corporate world yet, although they are close.. Too many tasks rely on Microsoft desktop Applications. Which don’t nativly run on Linux.
Openoffice(www.openoffice.org) is looking promising but still has a little ways to go.
about 8 years ago
1)The games are much better in Linux than in Windows. Highly recommended.
2)Linux needs to streamline the GUI interface to be more standardize and friendier like Microsoft and on overall still needs improvement.
about 7 years ago
I have been using redhat for only 3 or so weeks and I can see the enormus potential it has. The GUI is remarkable. It is so close to the Windows interface that almost any user given 10 minutes will be able to find anything. I think that if given the opportunity, any IT admin. should choose this O/S. As for the training costs, I dont know, I havn’t looked into it.
about 7 years ago
Funny, I had a similar experience, only reversed, operating system wise. Quite frankly, Linux is a flaming pile of shit. Try installing a program on RedHat 9. Let’s say… LMule. Once it’s installed, see if you can find it on the launch menu. See if you can run “lmule” from the “Run Program” option in the launch menu. Try to install RTCW: Enemy Territory for Linux. Oh sure, it’ll install fine, but then try to run it and watch it do absolutly nothing but fuck up your screen resolution.
Try to do just about anything without having to type some kind of password, which only prolongs the time to complete the task. There’s also a rumour that Linux runs faster than Windows. Please. Even on my old, junky laptop, Windows XP runs faster than any Linux distro I’ve tried – and that’s been quite a few.
Try getting through the installation of Slackware. Unless you’re highly in-tuned with computers and the way they work, you won’t be sucessful. If you happen to get through the installation, try getting it online. Oh yes, that would be a hoot.
Try doing something as simple as switching a monitor on a machine running Linux. Watch it pitch a fit like a 6 year old girl not getting the newest barbie doll.
Rather than just clicking on an .exe file and installing an application, you get to sit and wait for software to compile. Oh, and all of that technobabble that it spews at you when it’s doing it. Assuming you can read fast enough to see it before it disappears, it’ll take twice as long to even get a general idea of what it means. You might get done before it gives you an error, telling you that you don’t have one of the 1,233,563,832,643 lib files needed to install the simple application.
Try to find a video card that will perform as well on Linux as it does on Windows. Gaming on Linux is a fuckin’ joke.
More stable than Windows? I laugh. I laugh hard. The “up-2-date” feature in RedHat 9 has a nice, annoying icon next to the clock that tells you when updates are availble. Say you’ve just updated your system and you know there are no more available updates. You close it to get it off of your taskbar. 30 minutes later, you get an error message, out of nowhere, saying that the tray icon has crashed. Neat, eh?
Try to install Windows on an ATA hard drive, and then Linux on an SATA hard drive. Watch the bootloader never show it’s face. If you switch the boot option in the BIOS to boot from the SATA hard drive to compensate, it won’t detect Windows on the bootloader.
Try accessing your files on another hard drive in your machine with an NTFS partition. Oh yeah, that’s a good one. To do so, you have to configure the kernel to do so. Then, you have to create a folder, and mount the drive, specify the file system type, then get your files.
I could go on like this for weeks. Linux is a joke. Plain and simple. I guess people think that because it’s harder to preform simple tasks, or it requires more “terminal work”, that Linux is better than Windows.
Some people think that Linux is a more “hacker friendly” operating system. I laugh at this one too. Linux is no more hacker friendly than Windows is. If you’d like technical details on that opinion, I can damn sure deliver them.
Linux is in no way ready for mainstream desktop solutions.
about 7 years ago
Wow
Looks like linux is not for you my friend
Positive comments that will for sure help the community ( linux ) to work hard
Thanks for your comments
little tag line i found
if you know redhat… you know redhat
if you know slackware … you know linux
Have fun