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The Economist on The Rise of Linux
nickco3 writes "The Economist is telling the business world that Linux is a worthy adversay to Windows and Unix. It is free, runs on almost any hardware, and generally more secure than Windows As result it is dividing the industry into winners that offer Linux (e.g. IBM and HP), and losers that don't, (e.g. Microsoft). Sun is probably doomed."
Actually, the article, if you read it, did not say that Microsoft was losing. Rather, it said that M$ would come out less of a winner.
The poster of the root article needs to read the article. Doh.
You aren't going to get an answer here on /. that will be sufficient for you (and if you expect one, you are just a troller/flamer)... the best way to know is to use it a bit.
A good example of why I love it so much is that *every* object in the Kernel is synchronizable. You can wait on a file just like you can wait on a thread, process, or mutex. Once you get used to the architecture, it's very sweet.
I don't know much about Solaris, so I'd like to ask you guys out there. What makes Linux less capable? What does Solaris do that Linux can't do (at least well enough)? Just wondering.
Well, scalability is one major thing. Linux struggles with more than 4 CPUs and more than 4G of memory; Solaris handles hundreds of CPUs and a terabyte of RAM. Linux lacks the manageability of system resources offered by Solaris 9, which allows system resources to be prioritized for different tasks, with a guaranteed minimum available. And even if Linux could do this, it doesn't run on hardware than can be dynamically partitioned, unless it runs as a guest on z/OS, and in that case it's z/OS doing the work. Tight integration with the underlying hardware is another advantage for Sun; they know precisely every component in every system that Solaris runs on, because they designed and built it, so there are never compatibility issues. Solaris' high-performance, high-reliability filesystems are proven, not just betas (yes XFS is also proven, but in IRIX not Linux). Speaking of filesystems, Solaris has ACLs, whereas Linux just has the relatively crude user-group model. Linux doesn't have remote shared memory or IP multipathing (IIRC).
Have you ever programmed under Win32? This is simply false. Read the MSDN docs for PostThreadMessage() function: