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Linux Is Cheaper
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is running a story on what a lot of us already know: Linux IS cheaper than Windows. This not because it is free. It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts."
I have no doubt that Linux is cheaper in a lot of situations, but I am also sure that Windows, or indeed any other OS, is cheaper for some things.
There can be no one perfect solution.
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts.
Th-they skirt over this point a bit too quickly. The obvious reason that Linux admins are better sysadmins (overall) and can admin more machines is because they're, er, mostly self-taught.
After all, how many great sysadmins spent years pouring over 'How to be a Linux admin' books, struggling to get their 'LCE' (Linux Certified Engineer) certificates? None. Unh. Yet that's exactly how Microsoft admins are raised.
Linux admins (and originally users) are experimenters.. that's why they're not on the MS platform. Experimenters make good sysadmins, because they learn by themselves, learn clever admin tricks through experience, and, er, don't just rely on a bit of paper that says 'I'm a good sysadmin.'
I'd be a bit weary about the point that Solaris admins can 'learn Linux' (ohh, unh) within a few weeks though. People from stricter UNIX disciplines think Linux is some, er, easy-to-learn UNIX renegade. (unh, unh) It ain't true folks, it's like deep and stuff.
mogorific carpentry experiments
If linux were (pretend for a moment, I know it's hard) more expensive than Windows in terms of operating and management costs, what I'd realli like to know is whether or not it would still hold its own. I'd be willing to bet in favor of Linux, since it obviously has the advantage in security/stability/etc... but there's the real challenge: take away the price factor and you'll see the real winner.
On Slashdot, we don't say "thank you." We say "that's enough..." -_-;
Sure linux is cheaper if you're running five hundred servers, but where I used to work, we had only five servers, easily handeled by one admin
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
C'mon, folks. It's simple:
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I have a linux web/mail server running for a local non-profit organization of which the exectutive director is a friend of the family. Their website is very small, and doesn't need to be updated often. It gets about 100 hits a month. :) If they need the page to be updated, they send me the new text, and I update it via SSH.
I have had that server running for over 5 months now, and I haven't needed to physically visit the server in 4 months. That was because of a power outage; not even Linux is more powerful than God
The point I'm trying to make here is that this nonprofit has no IT department, no sysadmins. They are mainly 50 year old ladies who are smart enough to not ask what the difference between RAM and hard drives. They have a low cost webserver running, which is freeloading on a broadband connection they already have. They don't touch the server, which lies in the corner of an empty supply closet.
Let's see... The article states that Linux/Unix admins USUALLY do cost more, but now they don't due to the tech slump. In other words, the TCO is lower because of all the out of work admins drove down salaries. Therefore, more sophisticated Linux/Unix admins are getting screwed.
Now answer the question, "Aren't you happy to hear Linux is now cheaper?"
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive,
I've said this before but, while the above statement is frequently bandied about, I do not see evidence of this in the real world. Indeed the majority of job postings that I see for Linux sysadmins offer salaries that are a fair bit less than similar positions looking for MCSEs.
Indeed, there are also several commonly used salary surveys on the net that seem to indicate that Linux sysadmins are paid less than their Windows counterparts. I've even seen a few stupid cases where positions requiring Linux experence and an MCSE certification actually paid less than similar positions requiring an MCSE only.
Is this only the case in my region or is it the case on a wider scale?
almost any problem you run into with Linux can be solved via google in minutes.
and i'm sure that if you compared windows to linux, with one admin, with equal skills in their area of expertise, it would be a different story. This could be justa lot of fluff that /.'er love, but it could be true. I'm not saying it is, but what I am saying is this articlue probably took in mind the typical windows *idiot* admin. I've worked with many in my time.
Is in the "utility" services; DNS, DHCP, Authentication, File Shares, WWW, Proxy and Mail (Unless your work uses Exchange). The services in a medium or small company can be run on one box as opposed to M$ software that has components that interfere with each other. Need a test server? a decent pc will do. Need a secondary DNS/DHCP source for a remote office? Something small setup here and shipped there with the "hook it up/turn it on instructions. That's where the saving are. I'd go as far as client server, but most of the ones that float past me are "MS SQL vXXXX" required. Like the commercial says, you can replace most of a datacenter with a rack full of linux, but can you replace a rack 'o linux with a rack 'o M$? doubtful and expensive..
~corporate tool, but employed~
It's not too difficult to set up some various scripts to monitor 1,000 systems and report to one central location. Whatever problems are found, you see and fix. How often do you think more than 1/100 of those are having problems?
What does Lightwave have to do with anything? If you're using it to prove a point that not everything runs under Linux, you're correct. Most "consumer" or "small studio" apps such as Lightwave do not run on Linux. However, there are viable alternatives that sometimes (oftentimes) end up being better, more powerful, or beneficial in other ways. To counter your "Lightwave", there's Maya. Maya runs under Linux. A number of large animation houses use a Maya-Linux combination to keep costs down and increase productivity. Let's face it. Something that allows you to exit the GUI and render from the command line is a VERY good thing in terms of squeezing out as much out of your systems as you can.
As the article said, Linux keeps costs down as far as staffing goes. Instead of having 4 people on staff for Windows, 4 people for Mac, and 4 for Linux, you can pretty much fire the Mac and Windows admins, because Linux admins tend to be multiple-platform aware, so you get more for your money--even if you have to pay them more.
In addition to that, Linux is the most open and accessable platform. If something needs to be done on that platform, it pretty much can be done for free or implemented using an OSS solution, whereas with Windows you'll be required to either develop the resources in-house or purchase additional software/development services.
Yes, it's still a choice which one you want to run. But unlike Windows, it doesn't cost you anything to throw a copy of Linux onto your machine and dual-boot. There's no reason why you can't have a copy of Linux on the workstation of every person who might use it--you might even find that the copies of Windows go unused as Linux has come a LONG way in the past couple of years in terms of usability, compatibility, etc. You don't need to be a geek anymore--Windows often requires far more geekiness than Linux.
-Sara
If it ain't broke, don't fix it - according to the article.
And that is the problem with Windows. By the time i had gotten most of my servers to NT4, they were shoving Win2k down my throat. After i had gotten everyone onto Windows NT 4.0 workstation, i couldn't get it any more - i was forced to have W2k and NT4 Wkstn running side by side.
Windows, unless you just refuse to be able to run certain software, requires you to change everything every 2 years. Its a nightmare.
Mac OS X and FreeBSD wouldn't have required me to change so much stuff over the last two, years, and i don't see a big deal with the next few either.. while windows admins will HAVE to incorporate XP into the networks, because they will have no choice.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
TCO means total, which includes down time, admin time, install time, admin/user training time, related hardware needed to deploy and licenses.
Not to mention books, travel to conferences, meetings to obtain buy-in, aspirin, caffine and therapy.
A President of linux consultancy says that linux admins can handle more boxes than a windows admin.
This study is stupid. As a rule, there are more windows admins than anything else, because that is what the market demands. As a result, there are more $30-40k deserving windows admins who would get their hands full with a lot of boxes. Still, if you need admins for a 100,000 hit a day web site (which doesn't sound all that high to me), you need to hire people who can roll out identical, customized machines in short time, have experience monitoring, and can batch updates, etc. You can hire a bunch of cheaper admins, who will install hotfixes one at a time, rebooting each time, or you can hire one or two good admins who can qchain em together, and reboot when all are installed. TCO is as much a function of management and hr's hiring skill as it is or anything else.
ostiguy
Astroturfer or Uninformed? Either way, I miss the way /. used to be, before guys like you arrived.
Give me NIS or LDAP and NFS, I will maintain tenfold the number of Linux workstations that you can with Windows and I'll do it in half the time.
Group policy? We've had that for three decades, funnily enough we're quite familiar with it.
Remote software installation? Our netowrk oriented multi-user OS is designed for remote maintenance.
Some of us here have spent our entire careers maintaining developer communites that wholey consist of Unix workstations. Our heritage is fully inherited by Linux.
If your company tried Linux on the basis of hype, it probably means they initially got hooked on MS hype too. I doubt either decision was made objectively or wisely. Did it occur to your Slashbot bosses that maybe they should have only tried Linux out on a few machines first? That way it needn't have caused any significant pain. Also, a newly deployed Windows system isn't that hot either. You're co-workers are comparing something that's probably had months or years of bug-fixes, tweaking, and workarounds to something they just adopted. NEWSFLASH! Everything sucks just in different ways. Like any tool, Linux can do the job wonderfully once it is learned. Of course, you'll mash your thumb a few times on the way. Here's another newsflash: You've had years to forget how much it hurt when you first started using it. Don't bs me otherwise. I cut my PC teeth on 3.1 and have cursed at every version up to and including XP.
Linux doesn't sound like a problem here. Quit believing hype and maybe you'll have better new product experiences.
Incidentally, Slashdot is not a monolith. We have 15 year old young minds who think every piece of OSS software is GPLed and anyone who makes money with it is a thief as well as 15 year old Young Republicans who think OSS is communism. I'm sure others can think of even more savory types who hang out here. Remember, the IQ of a mob equals the intelligence of it's stupidest member divided by the size of the mob. It's pretty useless to give it advice.
A number of games run under Linux.. linuxgames.com talks about some of them, and more can be found with a simple google search.
As for "tasks", I've found that my mother can make much better use of Redhat Linux 8.0 than she can of WinXP. Supporting it for her is easier as well--"Hi mom, turned SSH on for me? Great--remember that green piece of paper with instructions on how to give me your IP?" For her limited word processing needs (She writes a weekly article for a local newspaper), there's Abiword and openoffice. For email there's Kmail or Evolution, or any other number of excellent email applications. There's free solitaire games that she loves, etc. Windows--to get the same functionality for this woman--I'd have to pay quite a bit more. I'd have to purchase Microsoft Word and pay for a LOT of features that she can't use, Outlook--again the same, and download a number of buggy shareware games that would likely cause issues for her down the line.
It's not the "casual home user" that is tied to Windows. It's the office user whose environment requires MS-Office ONLY features that have not yet been implemented in the OSS solutions available on Linux. It's the user that has specific requirements as far as software, which in turn has specific requirements in therms of OS.
For the casual home user, or even for the middle-of-the-line home user, Linux is *wonderful*. For the advanced user? More of the same.
-Sara
windows IS completely scriptable.
Isn't this one of the main reasons Windows is such a problem on both the desktop and in the server arena?
Not just the scriptability (Mac OS X goes a long ways in this regard) but the looseness of the implementation, which is the big reason admins stay so busy patching, etc.
Oen thing to note: the "less staff required" can often count against things in "managerial empire-building with lots of petty political power struggles" environments, which are unfortunately very common. Telling a manager "you'll need less staff" is not necessarily the best route to his heart, they might even take it as a threat.
No, that's not a healthy corporate culture. But in big companies and semi-states (a mainly european phenomenon where state-owned companies kinda-sorta privatise), it is a common one.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
The same thing with Mac users moving to Windows, and Windows users moving to the Mac, and Linux users moving to either platform--There are things that the new platform does not have, things that work exactly the same, and things that the new platform has that the old one doesn't. The trick is using the platform long enough to discover the workflow, and realize "Hey, this is really good for..." and "Hm. This isn't that great for .. and .., but I can make it work by doing a, b, and c."
Any company that moves to a new platform just because of hype is looking for a major disappointment, because NO platform today can live up to the hype of its supporters. First-time Windows users will find the Luna interface to be scary, certain things to be counter-intuitive, etc. First time Mac users will pull out their hair over certain permission-schemes, their eyes will ache from the animation and oversaturated bright colors and whites, etc. First time Linux users will type in "dir" and be totally confused as to why it doesn't behave like DOS.
After a while, any of these complaints go away--and the view of the OS becomes more practical. "Does it do what I need it to do?" "Does it work the way I need it to work?" "I know it's not the BEST in every area, but is it the BEST in the areas I require excellence in the most?"
Hype is a good thing and a bad thing. It gets the ball rolling, but it also encourages disappointment in those who absorb hype as 100% truths. Those who don't accept hype as an absolute truth, however, still exist--and they come over with realistic expectations and find many exciting things that exist on their new platform that they could only imagine on their old one.
A smart man will be a smart man, and a foolish one will be a foolish one. Guess which one will be disappointed. And guess which one the Linux community doesn't really want in the first place, no matter HOW nice it would be to have championed the Number-One OS of the future.
-Sara
And this is why windows admins don't understand how Linux admins manage that many machines. VNC is a bad hack that you'd only use if you needed cross platform remote display. You do realize that if you really needed to remotely run graphical apps, X programs are inherrently remote displayable. Not only that, but the power of linux administration is the fact that you *never* need to run a graphical program. If I have a farm of 150 web servers, I can make an httpd.conf on one of them and with a 3 line shell script (typed interactively on the command line) scp it to every machine on the network and restart those webservers. Or I could tie it to a cron job, or a script monitoring /var/log/messages for a certain event like a service going down, or have procmail do it when it recieves an email. Yes I know with the right packages and third party tools windows is scriptable as well, but its not designed around scriptability. The simplest way to permanently change the host name of a machine is still to go in with vnc (or terminal services, I have to be fair) and open up the network configuration dialog and change it. Which is easy, I admit. But over a slow network its infuriating. I can ssh in from a modem and edit /etc/sysconfig/network with vi and it'd be just as responsive as if I was on the local network. Again, I see the benefit of both approaches, but never would I personally want to administer a significantly large windows data center when a unix based solution was feasable.
Yes, pointless. The article is discussing the TCO of Linux vs. Windows (vs. Solaris) in a specific sort of web serving environment. The guy was claiming that he was unconvinced by the argument, which shows only that he didn't understand the scope of the argument. In short, he's not responding to the article, but to the somewhat misleading story title.
If you cannot run Lightwave on anything other than Windows, then Windows has the lowest TCO for that application. I get that. My advice still stands: Read the articles before posting. It's hard to hold a useful discussion when clueless folk who see "TCO" in the posting, and decide they already know both what the story will say and what their opinion is.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Replace Lightwave with.. oh.. any game ever made
;-)
;-)
Well, we were talking about costs in businesses here, so availability of games is hardly an issue, since the number one games played in offices (minesweeper, solitaire and freecell) come with any standard Linux install...
But seriously:
Windows has the best variety of mission critical apps out there
This is a nice broad statement, but it very much depends on what your mission is, wouldn't you agree? If you're for example in the business of developing Java-based software, Linux workstations are most certainly a nice cheap alternative. If your mission is education, the same thing may apply.
And please don't give me the "it will take ages to convert the users" story... as long as the sysadmins know what they are doing, anybody familiar with Windows can learn KDE in an afternoon... it took my girlfriend about an hour...
PageTurner Reader: open-source e-reader for Android with cloudsync. http://pageturner-reader.org
"Always in motion is the future" said Yoda. Decisions need to be "future-proofed". That needs flexibility. If you have room to manouver then you can react to the unexpected. Open source gives you that room to manouver.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Think of it as owning a book. You buy a book, you own the book. You can set fire to it, cut it up into individual sentences and rearrange it for humorous results, use the pages to wipe up fruit juice spills, sell it on eBay, or use it in a papier mache project.
But you don't own the ideas that the book conveys. Someone else has copyright over it. You cannot republish it, claim it as your own work, or write a sequel using the characters from the book (parodies excluded).
As a previous poster pointed out, there are also things you cannot do with it because the acts themselves are illegal.
When you download Linux, you own the software. You own the source. What you do not own is the copyright. If you accept the GPL, the copyright holder authorizes you to distribute the source under those terms. If you reject the GPL, you have the sort of rights that the owner of a book has.
If this is counterintuitive, it's only because Linux is distributed in a format that makes redistribution easy, while a book is not.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Correct me if I'm wrong... ain't this already been discussed over here... kinda daily in the last five years?
Well.. if you owned your own car and done 200mph on your own road, then that is fine.
Windows administration is enormously labor intensive, even if you set up everything the way Microsoft recommends you do. Windows administration (and Windows programming, for that matter) reminds me of the recent thread on games Everquest and the Virtual Skinner Box: you get the feeling that Windows tools are structured to dole out rewards to keep you playing, even if your skill level is pretty low. It's no accident that so many dialog boxes say things like "Congratulations, you have just..."; some accomplishment--to stick a CD in the drive and enter a serial number. The goal, after all, is to keep people buying and recommending your product; if it doesn't work effectively for them, that's OK as long as the customers don't notice and feel good about it.
As a result, "certified" Windows sys admins feel really good about what they are doing--they get a sense of accomplishment. But a skilled UNIX or Linux sys admin can often accomplish with a couple of commands in seconds what it takes the Windows admins hours to do.
Unlike Windows, Linux won't try to make you feel good or give you a pleasant user experience. It won't encourage you or compliment you. It's just a professional tool, and at that it's quite effective. What it will let you do is, given the same workload, spend more time on the beach (or posting on Slashdot, as the case may be :-).
seem to ignore the costs of upgrading. They always assume that you buy your fixed number of computers and then operate them for a fixed task over a period of time. They never seem to take into account that later on you may want to add more capacity to your computer system. Or you may be forced into upgrading your software, which may require new hardware or OS.
; en-us;LifeWin
For example:
If for instance if your deploying any machines with Windows 2000 Server/Professional now, then you will only have two years and three months of mainstream support. What happens if there's a critical exploit discovered (or released) one week after that ? Tough, you should have upgraded your OS by now.
Or how about if you developed and deployed an online conferencing systems with Windows Media encoder 7.1 just a year ago ? Well unless you want to be using unsupported software, your going to have to upgrade the software you developed to Windows Media Encoder 9 before the end of this year.
And even if it's acceptable to your company to run unsupported software, it's going to become harder and harder to find legitimater copies of the software you need. For example Office 97 would suffice for my word processing needs, but Microsoft have stopped selling it, and most of the copies on sale now are illegitimate. How much would a Microsoft inspection cost your company ?
Btw support lifetimes here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
IMHO, where the story submitter says "This not because it is free", it should read "This not only because it is free". Being free as in beer helps reducing costs you know (not to mention being free as in libre). Licensing costs do matter.
This study focused on web servers. That's it. Those who act like it means that Linux on desktops or other applactions will also have a lower TCO and hence is superior are reading way too much into the study.
This begs the question - are the costs of operating web servers really that large of a cost of most businesses? Sure, it is for some - companies that sell web hosting, maybe some ecommerce companies, ect. However, for most businesses things like desktops, applications, ect are a much larger cost - and there is no evidence that Linux has a lower TCO there. It would seem much easier to find a linux guru or two to manage your couple web servers than the number you would need for desktop support over Linux. Maybe I'm just prejudice, as I used to desktop support.
I have blog like everyone else
"Serious question: on the desktop, is there anything Linux can do that Windows can't?"
In my limited experience there isn't with the exception of proprietary software (as in this case). But there might be some other things that Windows is better at (there just must be, I'm sure of it, isn't there?)
"Then it wouldn't actually be cheaper, would it? TCO means total cost of ownership."
Yup. I think quite often people forget that cost is measured in terms other than just dollars.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Taking that TCO stands for "Total Cost of OWNERSHIP" then this cant be applicable to windows, since you dont actually own a copy of windows that you buy, you merely have a revokeable license to use it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Everyone's needs are different. The companies in the study were probably running more full-featured, fairly dynamic, ecommerce sites with ssl, self-hosted pics, etc. Your site seems very simple in comparison - a couple db lookups to create the indexes, a couple to handle the site's rating, the pictures all handled through affiliate sites. Additionally, much of your data seems to be fairly static, which again skews the results. I've also noticed cut corners which could potentially lead to security risks on other sites. All these things add up, which is probably how they got their figures.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
well, if i must respond to this:
first, i don't need you to tell me what my job is. i teach history and technology, and have been developing/sysadmining for several years, both windows and linux. i would suggest however, you get off your high horse and grab a whiff of your shit. it stinks, just like the rest of ours'. if you knew one thing about education, you'd realize that teachers do a helluva lot more, and need to, than just "teach". and for your edification, i am not a "teacher trying to be a technician". believe it or not, i actually know wtf i am doing. and no, dipshit, i'm not "experimenting", no more so than the LTSP, or K12LTSP, or Largo, Fl.
second, those machines had nothing to do with e-rate, so stop trying to act like you know something, 'cause you don't. they were old refurbs that we purchased from a reseller because we needed X number of computers per student for digital high school $. that included of course, any piece of crap computer laying around, the office computers, the old 486 we have running our voice mail, anything that would boot. and the money was used at our school? nope. at the high schools to turn them into "digital" high schools. money spent to put a computer on every teachers desk to run the new atendance program, shit like that. they knew from the start that those pieces of crap would not, could not be used. they didn't give a crap.
yes, i know it's gonna fail. and you almost have a good point, except that what do you think, people aren't gonan be able to learn how to admin a freakin linux box? you are right about the school techs. they are bottom of the barrel, for the most part. pay is crap, and no chance for movement, since most don't have a degree(no, i don't think that is important).
i'll give you a story. four years ago, we had a "pc" lab. no file server, nothing. students saved work to the desktop. had to always be at the same computer. half the time they lost their work. so in november, i install security software, lock the boxes down, and set up a linux/samba server using an a scrounged up pc and a couple of hard drives. every student had their own logon (simple to get a student list from sasi, write a perl script to automate adding users, config samba, etc.....) and it worked flawlessly, got hammered day after day, and never crashed until may when the district technidiots pulled the plug and f***ed the whole thing up. long story there. next week i get a dozen calls in my class where are the files, the printer, etc. i just laughed. it took them three years until we had a solution, and even konw, it still doesn't work right.
anyways, since you don't know me, nor i you, i'll just assume that you are an insecure mcse paper tiger since you talk so well out of your ass about being a technician. as mick foley says, "have a nice day"
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.