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A Continued Look at Linux vs Windows
Rogier van Vlissingen writes to tell us Paul Murphy has an interesting writeup on his blog about the continued Linux versus Windows debate with regards to some of the recent insights provided by various groups. From the article: "Disinformation comes in three major forms: innocent mistakes, intentional disinformation (aka FUD), and (self) delusion. Delusions are easily the most dangerous of these. In the IT context the most common delusion is simply that what we know is right in general or applicable to some specific issue when, in reality, it isn't. We know, and we act accordingly - with frequently catastrophic results."
Since when do blogs represent news? While blogs are interesting to read, they are by no means a good news source. Please stop allowing blogs as news sources. They are usually biased and the writers are normally amateurs spouting incompetent opinions. This person may be acclimated to the information pursuant to a linux vs. windows debate, but his blog should not allowed in this site as news. Additionally, I am getting tired of reading about this debate. If I want an opinion on windows or linux I will damn well use them both and figure out which one I prefer.
who is paul murphy and why the fuck do I care what some blogger has to say? /. has gone from a blog reporting on news to a blog reporting on blogs. Why bother?
This kind of stuff is always an oversimplification. We are going to see these things forever. For instance the very nature of this discussion is already ignoring FreeBSD, Mac OS X, etc. and thats before they even get into their arguments about why linux is better then windows.
How do you compare Linux to Windows when there are hundreds of different linux distros that do things differently as well. It seems that the authors of these comparisons don't truly understand that this question can't be answered. Yet we will continiously see articles pop up that says one is better then the other and of course it will sway one way or the other depending on which OS the person who did the study is partial towards.
When I read the SI study, I was *horrified.* The paper was uninformative, the methodology was flawed, and the analysis was unsupported.
My favorite quote though from the article is this:
This is absolutely correct. Treat Linux as if it were Windows, or vice versa, and you are asking for real pain.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
As long we're making arbitrary, over simplified judgements about which OS is supperior, why not base our decisions on their mascots? I think the SuSe iguana wins hands down. Linux 1, Windows 0
It makes real cupcakes, with a 40 watt bulb, and there's icing packets....but the secret ingredient is love.
Out of curiosity, have you ever used Up2date? Red Hat has, for quite a long time now, included a tool that works rather like Windows Update -- notifying you via a tray icon (or email, if you prefer) when there are new patches to apply.
The difference is that Up2date will upgrade a lot more components -- any applications you've installed, other than manual builds and unofficial RPMS -- compared to WU, which tends to be only useful for the core OS, IE, and WMP.
Debian-based distributions have Synaptic and the other APT front ends, which, honestly, outstrip Windows Update in practically every way -- even including graphical tools for managing configuration changes needed when updates are applied.
You're reading a Slashdot article...about a blog...which is criticizing a report...which is pretty obviously another paid-for-study.
Gah.
That's so many orders of removal away from meaningful content that it's amazing.
Plus, the argument is about the technical merits of Linux versus Windows. You know, I like Linux. I think that it's a pretty nifty system. But, I have to be honest. I think that the technical merits of Linux comprise a pretty small chunk of the real-world benefits it has over Windows.
I think that the biggest reason that I'd rather have a Linux box running something is just that the cluefulness factor of Linux folk tends to be significantly higher. Thus, the chance that the guy writing the software and adminning the machine actually knows what he's doing is significantly better. I know a couple of Windows hackers that I'd call competent, and one that's really good, but of all the Linux hackers I know, I can't think of even one that really doesn't know what he's doing, and most of them are extremely good. It's not that the Penguin is the end-all be-all, it's that his adherents are damn knowledgeable.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
that MS is first and formost a marketing company where its second place position is heald by the legal department which also partakes in chess (the idea of sacrificing your own to obtain an advantage worth more then teh sacrifice). Third place at MS is not even innovation but rather imitation or buyout ...
When you understanding this, you understand MS. To understand MS you know that what was once something ignored by MS, then laughed at by MS and then lied about by MS.... there is something of history in teh direction of open source software.
To compare Windows to Linux is like comparing carrots to meat and potatos....
If the vast majority of (low wage) administrators are trained and have experience in, and solely in, the "Windows way," I'm not sure that allowing the Linux admins to use the "Unix way" would have been realistic. Yes, they could do it, and do a better job using the "Unix way," but that might make the study less useful and less accurately predictive given the shortage of people adequately trained in the "Unix way."
Also (and this is an honest question, I have no idea what the answer is), is the truly the "Unix way" to "duplicate your production environment on the sysadmin's workstation and debug any processes to be applied to production there before proceeding?" Is that even possible?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I am a paid Linux consultand/admin. If I would have read what they wanted me to do... I would have said no. Methodology in supporting a linux server is all wrong. Still one admin mangaged to pull it off. He probably didnt fully follow there rules.
I've mangaged to live update a server with Fedora core 1 all the way through each core release till 4 and kept it live and running.
security updates? 'yum check-update' 'yum upgrade $X'
If you run Linux like Windows, expect Linux to have the problems of Windows too.
...Goofus and Gallant!
Goofus would rather turn on his computer and be a corporate tool for Microsoft without giving a second thought to how much richer the world would be, intellectually speaking, if everyone spent a little more time actually learning how computers worked instead of learning MS specific pointy clickety stuff.
Gallant spends time learning about how to utilize the resources in his PC as efficiently as possible, sharing his knowledge with anyone who will listen and helping people to help themselved by using Linux as the primary operating system and open source applications for true productivity.
Goofus doesn't care how much bandwidth he uses while downloading internet pr0n with his insecure P2P client that has trojaned his system and turned his system into a spam bot while at the same time complaining about how slow his system is because it's over six months old.
Gallant is a polite internet citizen. "Wow. This ISO download of Fedora Core 5 is going to take me good long time to download. I've got 25 meg down available right now, but my neighbors on the cable system might need to download some things too. So I'll lower my downstream during daytime hours to half a meg and only go up to 2 megs between 2:00AM and 4:00AM".
Goofus thinks that pirating software is cool because it saves him money that he can use to fill the tank on his gas hog SUV. "Haw haw!! Adobe thinks that we're all suckers who will pay them what they ask for their crap program! I'll show them! I'm gonna fire up Kazaa and get it for free! I'm a revolutionary who's stickin' it to the man"!
Gallant respects software licensing: "No Jim Bob. You see, even though I no longer use Windows, I am well aware of Microsoft's licensing requirements and you can't just take that copy of Windows and install it again on your cousin's PC because it's a license violation. If your cousin wants Windows XP Pro, he's going to have to buy the legitimate upgrade copy from a valid retailer".
Goofus doesn't care about other people's property or privacy: "Hey... looks like that hot neighbor Jolene's PC is accessible in Network Neighborhood. Well, well, well... Let's have a looksee at what's ono her hard drive. Oooohhh... C:\Private\JPEGs\XXX\Me, Branden and Rand Partying. That looks like a keeper"!
Gallant warns his neighbors that their machines might be insecure: "Sorry to bother you Jenna, but I noticed that your computer is readily accesible to anyone else in the apartment complex. If you want I can show you how to make it secure". Jenna: "Why thanks Gallant! I'd like that. By the way, if you'd like I could make us something for dinner when you come over. It's the least I could do". Gallant scores.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Well in our case, we have a full fledged QA environment that mirrors our production environment except for the number of app servers. It's even hosted in our datacenter to mimic connectivity.
We even restore a copy of our production database before each major release to the QA box.
Interestingly enough, we do the same thing for our few Windows servers (Navision for instance. Just did an upgrade over the weekend).
I can't understand who would apply patches to a live system without a qa run first. The other thing that bugs me is that they didn't use the same application stack across the board. A better test would have been something like WebSphere or tomcat talking to a DB2 or Oracle database. Those products would have been better tests.
The other thing that bugs me is that they did a major OS upgrade for some vendor binary. Would the same vendor binary have required a 200 to 2003 upgrade?
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Seen this one so many times I'm not even going to read it. Here is what it says:
Most people use windows, and are ignorant.
Linux used to be rough, but is growing fast.
Linux is better than Windows in 4 of 5 ways (take your pick).
People should use Linux.
It is now Linux's time to shine, in fact, 112% of computer users will switch to Linuxin the next 4 hour.
Saved you 15 minutes.
Go ahead, mark me a flamebait, but even I (I use OSS software and OS all the time) get tired of these repetitive and incredibly biased compairisons.
Typical slashdot-prejudice. "So it's a blog. Well that automatically means it's full of crap about the writers mood and sexual activities and his/hers dogs daily life. Oh and I didn't bother to RTFA, because I have this 5-Insightful-O-Matic which helps me to write witty and cynical remarks and get respect."
Sure there are billions of blogs that are basically worthless. But there are also blogs that are doing real reporting, that are good sources of info.
Yes blogs are more biased. But they wear their bias openly on their sleeve. I greatly prefer that to a writer that pretends (even to him/herself) that they have no bias and writes what they think is "Objective" but always has a slant. I can read a right-wing blog and know where they are comign from. I can read a left-wing blog and knw where thety are coming from. If you range widley you can get a pretty good picture of what is going on, and a lot of interesting stories that the real media just pass right by or else make light notice of.
Furthermore blogs are often more accurate because they are (if the blog has a decent reader-base) correctly quickly. I've been involved with a few stories that have gone in the paper over the years and EVERY one of them had major facts wrong. Those are the ones I know about, how am I supposed to think that newspapers or other media get the other facts right as well?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder, is this an example of delusion that the author referred to? Do you really know enough about low-level kernel resource management and subsystems to judge that the unix architecture is superior? Or is this just something you "know" to be true?
Maybe I'm way off base and you have very specific reasons for believing that the unix architecture is fundamentally better. But almost everyone I talk to who complains about the "architecture" is really complaining about tools, like shells and programs (e.g., PHP, Perl, etc.), and is relatively clueless about the OS architecture (disclosure, I think the modern NT kernel is pretty well-designed, even if the default tools are sub-par.)
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I see the same problem when dealing with students who come from a Solaris or Linux background -- usually they get tripped up in IP address configuration, which is very different on Mac OS X than it is on a standard Unix system. The Mac OS X way is much more dynamic and self-configuring, but this means that essentially ifconfig(8) is only useful in a read-only mode and cannot be used to write changes.
My respect for Paul Murphy is only increasing.
--Paul
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051117-5590 .html
excerpt:
"As one might expect, the Linux system did not even come close to stacking up to Windows Server. The "granularity and high modularity of Linux" led each administrator down a different path when issues occurred due to the ambiguity of the problem. The Linux administrators were also portrayed as being confused when updates needed to be found, and at one point, a system was rendered useless by a GLIBC upgrade that went awry. On a positive note, once the SUSE server was upgraded to version 9, everything went back to a state of normal operation.
Overall, the study displays Microsoft as king of the server hill. The 49-page study (which I managed to read in its entirety), although claiming to be unbiased, reads like a huge piece of Microsoft propaganda. The Linux administrators were portrayed as lab monkeys at certain points, whereas the Microsoft administrators came off as drones that just went out to Windows Update for all their system needs. It's very difficult to read this study without believing that an obvious bias was in place."
So what your saying is that he's your average Slashdot reader.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I sincerely doubt that the general /. reader dos not know of the alternatives. Actually I'd bet most of us has made up our minds and are more than willing to engage in a flame war to show our view.
:p
But lets face it:
Windows vs Linux is like my butt! Its divided, and no mater how shity one side thinks the other is, it's not getting rid of it.
www.aleo.no
I've been an IT administrator in a company that was funded by Microsoft. We were actualy given briefings quarterly showing 'studies' that prooved that Windows was better. Kind of like what McDonald's restaurants started doing after the movie 'Supersize me' blew their cover. They 'proved' to their employees that the company is doing the 'right' thing. Pretty much what Microsoft does even for mere end-product affiliates.
.NET framework (or other development technologies built to target Windows Developers). Lovely Idea. However, The amount we 'can' know about .NET framework without referring to a hacker's manual, is basicaly the amount Microsoft want's us to know 'safely'. So that someday when we need a better solution, We need to go back to microsoft and pay more. It would be silly for such a big corporation to PROVIDE a versatile solution if it wants to make money. Why wont Intel overclock their CPU's and send them off with a bigger heat sink before marketing? The cost? (it would be a mere 5 dollars over the original). Would you pay 5 dollars extra (over a 3.4 Ghz) for a 3.8 Ghz machine?. I definately would. (Do not say it is unstable, almost all of my home pc's run on P4 3.4 Ghz overclocked systems at 4.01 Ghz safely, and I do most of my office work on them). Same reason, why would Bill Gates unlock all the possibilities of Windows all at once for the hackers and programmers to explore?. Why not keep them coming back for more.
I was the person in my IT department who suggested the team move to Linux, because I was sick of having to 'read' Microsoft manuals of their software when they 'launched' something new. It is true, Microsoft basicaly assumes that its 'end-user' even if its a Software engineer by training, is basicaly stupid. Explaining to the person who said 'Windows any one can run, linux is for specialists'. It does not end there.
Let's say (like in my case) I have a particular e-commerce solution to handle and I want my application and (OS) to be tailored to that solution. Let's also assume Windows DOES provide such a solution and it works great. Patches are seemless, updates are a breeze, I could deploy it with my eyes closed. Everything great so far. Let's say now though, my company starts dealing with another company that has a different e-commerce application working for them. Or my companies demands change. It wont be then a simple matter of 'upgrade' or 'download a patch to fix'. It would be a matter of making the program work for me, without having to pay thousands of dollars and relicensing new software?. Microsoft is basicaly a strictly 'product based business' NOT a solutions provider. There are alot of people who claim 'Microsoft has developed several seemless integration options' Such as the
If you are going to have a 'technical' debate on Windows vs. Linux, i'd pose this question: When you have a dual processor Xeon system for your main file servers, and you want to use all that processor power and high pipeline bandwidth 'only' to ensure data security and smooth retrieval. If there is any one who has worked on powerful machines and used both Linux and Windows would understand when I say that 'a trimmed linux distribution' can deal alot better with raw hardware pottential than Windows OS can.
Bottom line is, I switched to linux to 'free' my company from the Microsoft bond.
It is TRUE, given the 'right' set of solutions, Microsoft OS and Linux distributions BOTH perform well. In some situations Microsoft has a clear victory, in others Linux rules the day. There never can be ONE study of ONE solution to proove LINUX is better or WINDOWS is better. There can be common sense that says on the long run, I'd rather know what i'm doing so that I can build upon it. Rather than having to call teacher Bill Gates for help.
And you have very little of it with Microsoft. You do things the MS way, or you are fucked. This is not a 'delusion', stigma, FUD, or misinformation. It is a business model; a very succesful, and well marketed, business model. This is the core interest of Microsoft and the essence of Windows as a whole:
"How do we keep people from making a choice to use something else"
This is the thought process behind your Exchange server, Active Directory, Roaming Profiles, Office documents, OS patches, and Tech support. All wrapped up in a really sexy desktop.
Linux is about choice. Linux is about standards. Linux is about YOU deciding what's best for YOU and then having the freedom to do it and contribute back to the whole process. That is what Linux is about.
You make the choice.
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