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Windows 2003 takes 5% away from Linux
ZuperDee writes "According to Netcraft, the number of Windows 2003 servers has doubled since July, and 5% were running Linux before, which is consistent with the trends they've been observing for some time. This doesn't look good for Linux, in my opinion. Maybe we should all start to think about jumping ship?"
Well, Thailand just signed a five year Partner in Learning contract with MS, where they get a bunch of outdated machines and software at a large discount. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop next year on a forced migration to 2003 Server (.net?) and the resulting budget crisis.
How long a shelf life can Win98 have at this point?
Put identity in the browser.
It is probably possible that the only reason those 5% were using Linux in the first place was because there old version of windows didn't support the feature the needed properly, so they were forced to use Linux. Now that Windows 2003 got the features they switched back. Or perhaps it came with a hardware upgrade and they got it packaged. So they just replaced the linux system with the win2003. It is possible that that 5% may have believed Microsoft redirect about lower TCO. or It may hard to believe but there are some people who don't care what OS they are using just as long as it works.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Perhaps it's a time for Ask Slashdot: Why aren't you switching to Linux?
Excellent chance to see what Linux is lacking and perhaps maybe even show few people that Linux has the options they think it lacks!
Actually - I know exactly why.
Curiosity. Microsoft is giving away demo CD's almost as freely as AOL does. So if you're remotly curious - you can just throw it on a non critical web server just to see what it's like.
I bet that's what going on here - we're talking 'bout a few thousand servers that have Windows 2003 - and only a *few* of those were orgionally Linux.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
If you ever worked at an ISP that hosted both Windows ASP/Front Page sites and UNIX PHP/CGI/DreamWeaver sites you know first hand how much of a royal pain in the ass managing the Windows sites is. Windows accounted for only 10% or so of our hosted sites but consumed about 65% of our support budget. It's simply too hard or even outright impossible to automate administrative tasks.
I've heard from several sources that Windows 2003 makes this *much* easier, so it's very possible that the major hosting companies that have to deal with all of these ASP/Front Page sites that once moved as many sites as possible to a Linux platform to cut their costs have moved back now that they have Windows 2003.
And it only took Microsoft 6 years to start addressing this market, and of all of the people who said Windows 2003 was way better, they still have a lot of complaints.
In our case, we switched our Samba servers over to Windows 2000 about 18 months ago because a new CIO was installed, and he commanded from the ivory tower that we would be all Microsoft within one year from his start date. No, we aren't using 2003--yet. But it seems conceivable to me that other companies are in similar situations... Their linux machines run great, like toy cars on Christmas morning, but somebody somewhere in authority gets a pitch from an MS salesman, and the next thing you know, bye-bye Samba and Apache, hello IIS and Windows 2003 file servers. (Ugh!)
So in our case, it was an arbitrary decision by somebody higher up. We never had ANY problems with the Samba servers, but because he used to work at Microsoft (in Redmond, y'all!) it was done.
Or perhaps they decided they wanted to re-write their whole web-site in ASP.net. I know a job I applied for recently was mine until we started talking about their web-site, and I recommended they not go ASP but implement their new site in HTML/PHP on apache using a low-cost database like mysql or postgres. As a one-man band, I would prefer to spend my time patching the parts of apache/php/mysql that need patched, rather than having to test and verify the twice per afternoon stuff that has been out from MS lately.
Who did what now?
I've had exactly the opposite experience. Once I got rid of all MS servers and moved to Debian, life has been, comparatively, a breeze. I'll take apt-get over hfnetcheck any day! And in comparison, Linux is way, way, way simpler than Windows. Oh, yeah -- and have fun running around to every server in you site to do updates because Windows doesn't support remote admin!
The worst thing that microsoft has done for our industry is to breed a whole generation of check-box programmers and admins -- if they can't tick off some checkbox to perform a task, they don't want to be bothered! What they don't realize is that you can only get 90% of the way there, then you're stuck.
MS has been running this Try Windows Server 2003 FREE for 6 months. Those stats probably reflect people using the free trial. Linux has always been free. The stats will be very different in 6 months. Some will actually kepp Windows Server 2003, some will crack it and keep it, but hopefully, most will return to Linux. Just my 2 bits.
If it can go wrong it wnetscape: Segmentation Fault, Core dumped
With only 0.4% of sites in the first 6 months after release, Windows2003 has already failed.
But who cares about serving "myhosting" sites? They are the entry level, mostly very simple static pages. Windows Server 2003 target market is a) high end e-commerce web sites and b) intranet applications. It's about choosing the right tool for the job and not letting ideology instead of intelligence make decisions for you.
Now, if you have figures for "dollars per day transacted on the web by OS" I think you will find that Linux comes very far behind commercial Unix and Windows. Which goes to show, you can prove anything you like by careful selection of statistics.
Personally I drive a manual shift. If you are a POWER user, or driver, you want as much control over what your machine as possible. You also want to be able to tweak it to get the most from it. I run a smallish ISP 1000 accounts and almost all of our network used to be Windows. I have since converted almost all the servers to linux. My life has been much easer since then. The servers that do break 9 out of 10 times are the Windoz boxes. If I replace the motherboard or video card in my linux machines it's easy to reconfigure the box with less than 10 min of down time. The Windoz boxes almost always need a OS reinstall. When I added a second processor to my linux boxes a simple kernel recompile (while the server is up) and I'm in business. When I put a second processor in my Windoz box...BSOD! Time to reinstall the OS (server down while I do this).
While Linux community has been beleaguered by the fights like "Which fonts to include in the default distribution?" and "How do we make KDE/Gnome closer to MS Windows?", Microsoft has been investing and taking over the market share.
The company is focused as ever on keeping control of the computer market. You want the truth? Well, if you can handle it - Windows has more than 90% of the Tablet PC market. And that, remind you, is a market that just popped up few years ago.
How many Linux vendors did you see struggle for footprint in the Tablet PC market? How many of them announced R&D budgets to develop digital ink and writing recognition? Well, no wonder that Microsoft owns this market within a year, and soon enough as it gets big everyone will yell a monopoly. I guess the biggest Linux vendor was just way too busy with Bangalore job opportunities springing up.
Obvious troll.
Other than the tight integration with the OS and they both come from Redmond I suppose.
We use plenty of 2K servers at work and, the non-stop critical patching excepted, haven't had a problem with them for two years, so I'm not a 2000 hater. At home it's Gentoo boxes. I know them both and you are wrong.
I have a good idea where some of this Linux-shifting is coming from...I talked to some Microsoft salesmen, trying to sell me some financial software. They off-handedly asked me what I had for server software...Previously I had Novell Netware, which they didn't care much about. But the most recent time, I mentioned I ran Linux. They were very, very interested...and in fact offered me a $70,000 software "grant" if I would put in a Windows Server. I am not going to take the same road as my previous district (of which I was an underling, and not in charge)...which is now in the position of almost yearly forced upgrades from Microsoft, at a yearly licensing fee exceeding $50,000. They are caught in a swirling monetary vortex from which there is little or no escape...particularly so since their "consultants" keep pushing MS onto them with no remorse.
I've had mostly the opposite experience.
:(
I first tried linux back when it was kernel 0.99.something. Neat toy, but not useful.
Slackware 3.0 was my first "real" linux. Neat toy, but not useful on the desktop. I was learning a lot of stuff about *nix though. I kept it on a partition though, because there were a few cool X games, and I could code in Perl. I kept up with the Slackware releases for a while.
Things started to change when I installed Red Hat 6. It supported all of my hardware. I installed both GNOME and KDE. GNOME wouldn't start for some reason, but KDE would. KDE was pretty cool, and made things fairly useful.
I found I booted into Windows less and less... until finally the only time I ever used Windows was to play games or use MS Office.
I'm now running RH 9 and since I've been Linux-conscious on hardware purchases all of my hardware is supported well. Applications like OpenOffice have removed my dependence on MS Office.
There is only a single reason I ever boot Windows: My wife likes to play Age of Mythology with me over the LAN, and it doesn't run on Linux. Since I don't play it all the time, it's not a reason to boot into Windows by default.
Everything else I want/need can be found in Linux, and works well.
I do have RH9 installed on another machine but it always comes back to the same thing. Some program I need/want doesn't exist for Linux or some hardware that I use won't work, or at best works very poorly.
Would you mind naming these software and hardware?
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
This really just points to the continued commoditization of software infrastructure. As one commenter points out. Microsoft is letting people run a free trial of Windows Server 2003 for six months.
To actually run Linux in an organization actually costs money. You can use the price of support contracts as a proxy to figure out average costs.
Given the availability of sofware that runs across the two platforms (apache, tomcat, open office) and the use of open file formats available on either, at some point your choice between the two just becomes a question of costs.
Sounds like Microsoft may be bringing their offerings down near enough to the commodity price point that people do not perceive a difference.
Please write to the hardware manufacturers. Tell them you want Linux support and drivers. When I was building my machine my video card choices came down to NVidia GeForce4 and the Parhelia. At the time the Parhelia didn't have a linux driver so I went with the GeForce4 that did. I wrote both NVidia and Matrox explaining my choice, lack of linux driver on the parhelia side. I didn't hear back from NVidia but I did hear back from Matrox. They said the Linux drivers were on the way. A month later I saw them on their site. This was about a year ago.
If the manufacturers don't know there's a market they're not going to both. I like to think I had a little affect in getting that Parhelia driver out
Remember, the manufacturers are interested in one thing, money. If you have it and will spend it, they will come.
Cuz I can't imagine him posting this obvious bit of trollbait. Neil Stephenson should be more (in)famous for a paper he did called "In the Beginning was the Command Line", which does a better job of explaining the social factors driving the contemporary O/S "Religious Wars" than anything else I have ever seen. Go read it and and come back with a clear head. As for "jumping ship", well, I think I mentioned trollbait...
Death Dances Only With The Living
Switching to Linux is Hard(TM)....
It's kind of difficult to explain why, but it has something to do with the documentation being difficult to use.
There is plenty of Linux documentation, man pages, HowTos, and all kinds of other stuff in newsgroups/forum postings.
But often times, it is very difficult to find a simple, step-by-step instruction list to accomplish a task that I know LOTS of other people have done.
For example-----I do not know how to make my own initrd. I run Suse 8.2, and wanted to test the 2.6.0-test5 kernel. Couldn't get it installed properly. I was running Grub, and the make install script was not configuring Grub correctly. For some reason, the mkinitrd script was not producing the right file either (quite possibly I was not using it correctly).
All sorts of little issues like this, that thousands of you power users out there have been able to do correctly, I have not be able to get around, since the documentation is often indicipherable.
Maybe I'm an idiot, but I spent hours, and hours, looking through man pages and searching on google. I didn't bother posting to a newsgroup, instead, I gave up, and started using Lilo.
2.6 couldn't find my root filesystem. Don't know why (probably mis-configured my initrd). Don't care. 6 hours invested? Better off reverting to 2.4.
I have similar problems---My fonts in mozilla are not anti-aliased properly, and I can't figure out why. I've configured it the same exact way as I did in Mandrake, but the fonts are butt ugly.
All sorts of other minor, nagging issues too. I won't go into them now, but it pisses me off the way forum posts will refer to man pages which refer to man pages which refer to 'common' knowledge, which I'll have to google for, and which won't apply to my distribution.
Perhaps, what needs to happen is more and better contextual help. Maybe an interactive --help switch in most programs? Or just redesigning man pages---This is a project that I would definitely love to participate in, but I just don't have the knowledge---If other people were willing to contribute suggestions, I would love to help organize an 'alternative' comprehensive man page set.
Not that I'm going to switch to Windows anytime soon---I only use Windows 2000 for eve-online, 'cause WineX doesn't support directx 9 yet, and i'm an addict (savage battle for newerth is native linux, though).
I just will have to keep fighting the nagging issues (easier than fighting the giagantic issues that Windows has (more sort of inconsistency and instability problems))
Cheers,
WhiteWolf
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Now I will admit that I still have 2 Linux boxes I host client's web sites on, but most of my boxes now either run FreeBSD or OpenBSD and I have an iBook as my main computer.
Why? It's been my humble opinion that Linux has been a bit of a bastard child. Is it a desktop OS, or a server OS? Its flexablity is its greatest strength and its achellies heel at the same time. With no standards between distros on simple things, like the path to PERL, can cause headaches for software developers. I once work on a project where we had to code three different versions of an app, one for RH, another for Mandrake, and one for Debian. After that expirance, I got fed up with the Linux Platform about the same time as Mac OS X.1 came out.
FreeBSD was/is designed as a server OS first, and if you want to toy with it, it can also make an effective workstation. However this is where Mac OS comes into play: There are companies that are publishing commercial software for the platform. So I can interface wtih 90% of the web design/graphics world that use Photoshop, dreamweaver, QuarkXpress, and other such programs where as due to the pain in the ass Linux is to port across distros, commerical companies WON'T port their products. I will even admit to having MS Office, and I actully LIKE it on mac. It works wonderfully.
While the OSS community has developed some kick ass apps, like the ERP module OSSuite (NOLA I think is the sourceforge project) is what I use to keep track of our business's accounting needs including payroll, W-2's, inventory, etc., there is still a vast void of software needs outthere. GIMP is certianly not a photoshop killer. Back in the days of PS 4 and 5, GIMP looked like it was on the track to possible create a much better product, but as now it seems as though GIMP has made very few improvements over the last two years and it still takes a lot more time and effort to get the same results as Photoshop. Photoshop 7 now blows GIMP away in my book.
The two Linux servers I have still are Sun Cobalt Raq servers and I still use them because of the ease of maintance, but all my ecommerce sites are on FreeBSD machines and I have had very little problems with these boxes. Hell two are still running FreeBSD 3.4 and had uptimes of like 250 days until I patched OpenSSH and several other updates two weeks ago.
RH and SuSE are getting closer to getting Linux from Geekdom to mainstream as SuSE is large in Europe. I used it when I studied over there for semester as the school had a windows lab and a linux lab, but that is mainly a result of GUI installers and KDE & GNOME.
At our new business, I have FreeBSD on both of the terminals (we inheirted two PIII 700 Dells & 3 PIII 550 Gateway's when we bought the business) and instead of paying $2500 for four new computers, I slaped FreeBSD 5 with KDE on there, install mozilla and linked them to the office server which is configured as a local webserver with no outside pipeline and we use OsCommerce as our POS system.
Now this article is a bit trollish about jumping ship. I stats and as Mark Twain wrote, "Lies, Damn Lies, and Stats". Approach with caution. OSS software is starting to get looked at, I work as a independant tech consultant, and Linux gets the press thanks to RH and SuSE providing what Linux needs to get into main stream: commericalization. There is a number you can call for support, if you need it.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Over at some dedicated server providers I see that linux servers with the same hardware as windows server cost more then the windows version. I just sat there wondering how the hell can windows software be cheaper then free software.
Note that these servers are unmanaged so the provider has no personnel costs related to that at all.
Hmmm... Pie...
*sigh*, ok, let's do the math...
i don't know where you live, but where i live, a kWh costs around $0.08. 100W-17W = 83W (difference between operating the computer vs. the router, as mentioned above somewhere).
so, 83W * 24 h/day * 365 days/yr * 1kW/1000W = 727 kWh/yr.
multiply that by $0.08, and that's on the order of $58 he'd be saving per year running a linksys router instead of a computer. assuming the router costs $40, he's paid for it in a little over 8 months. less, actually, since he wouldn't have had to buy his friend the case of beer ^_~.
and that's assuming the figures are correct. the 17W quoted was for a wireless router, and i'd bet they use a bit more power then the non-wireless kind. i'd also tend to think that a computer would clock in at more than 100W, even if it's a simple system with no extraneous hardware.
still tho, i'm not saying that a new linksys router would be a better choice - i'd personally rather have the flexibility of a bsd or linux box as a router/firewall. but regardless, don't make wild claims about electricity costs without a quick math check ^_~.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.