The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won

xtaski writes "Dana Blankenhorn bluntly states a reality that many have known: 'The war is over and Linux won'. With Oracle and Microsoft putting Linux in the spotlight and positioning themselves to grow with Linux. 'A new report shows that 83% of companies expect to support new workloads on Linux against 23% for Windows. ... Over two-thirds of the respondents said they will increase their use of Linux in the next year, and almost no one said the opposite.'"

Comments

Re:

[AKAImBatman]

At worst, it is like the Japanese general ( admiral? ) who is alleged to have said after Pearl Harbor: "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant."

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. He spent a significant amount of time in the US before the Japanese attacked. He felt that the pre-emptive strike was a mistake, and that it would only buy them about 6 months reprieve before the American war machine was fully geared up and ready. Thus his "I fear I have awakened a sleeping giant" comment.

He was right. Six months later, the U.S. turned the tide at the Battle of Miday. The Japanese Navy was nowhere near as resilient as the U.S. Navy, and their losses hurt them deeply. Combined with the incredible number of carriers the U.S. began to manufacture, the six month turning point was a deadly one for Japan.

Wars are fought in the DND, MOD, DOD and Pentagon

[flyingfsck]

and there, Linux hasn't so much won, as it is simply accepted as a fait accompli. The networks run by government departments are enormous beasts, with tens/hundreds of thousands of desktop PCs running Windows XP and thousands of servers running Irix, Solaris, OpenBSD, Linux and Windows 2003 server. The interesting thing is that all new server installations are either Linux or Windows 2003, other versions of UNIX have pretty much fizzled out and Linux (specifically Red Hat and Novell) is used for critical servers, firewalls and data-diodes, while Windows is mainly used for Active Directory and Exchange, protected behind an army of penguins.

Re: "Sleeping giant"

[Deadstick]

Gotta watch those screenwriters:

http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Isoroku_Yamam oto's_sleeping_giant_quote

rj

Re:

[Procyon101]

No, the needs aren't typical, they are dev needs. The typical user's needs are email+web browser+picture viewing+cd recording... things that can be done on windows or linux with the same ease (or, save for the cd recording, a palm pilot or alot of cell phones). The only people who care about what OS they are using either have a pet app they can't do without (photoshop or maya, or autocad for instance) and it doesn't matter if that app is BeOS only.. they'd use it. The other group is computer professionals, and the situation there is tilted highly in Linux favor.

$1000 is not an exaggeration... in fact it's probably low. While I can get Open Source or 3rd party dev tools, I'm still going to need visual studio for compiling/debugging if I am doing any serious MS-centric coding. I need the header files, I need the linked libraries, all that stuff. I could conceivably set it up with msys.. but that's a big hack. The VS lite version, like most "lite" versions of anything, is not going to cut it for productivity. I believe the going price for a decent VS package is close to a grand by itself, but I haven't personally purchased one recently. The next thing is office, although open office is pretty compelling here and integrates just fine. The big issue with open office, is although it can read most anything MS office spits out, the reverse is not true, so other users who shelled out hundred of dollars cannot read my stuff unless I cross save to MS formats, and then I lose formatting and such as the support for that is pretty fuzzy. So add in a couple other apps I might want and $1000 bucks or so is pretty conservative for a computer professional's standard workstation. A system admin's workstation can probably do it for half that, as they don't do the dev-tools thing.

So then.. having shelled out the dough, we step back and look what we have. SSH is the primary deficiency I see. The reason you don't know what it is is windows has no equivelent, but trust me, for administration purposes, it is *the* killer app and probably the most commonly used application used by a unix professional outside of the command line. What it is: "Secure Shell". It's simply an app that is #1 strongly encrypted and #2 gives you a command prompt on a foreign machine. Most any unix box will have it turned on, and most headless routers, switches, etc also have a port. The MS equivelent is Terminal Services, which gives you a full view of the desktop on the remote system. It's handy for some things, but most of the time I don't WANT the desktop of the other sytem... I just want a command line. I want to reboot the machine or look at a file or set a reg key and loading that full desktop is WAY overkill not to mention slow... prohibitively on low bandwidth lines. It's also ram hungry and takes alot of proc power. Many times I have not been able to reboot a misbehaving windows server through TS because transferring that whole desktop over TCP is just too big of a job for a machine caught in a tight loop or OOM... but a machine has to be *REALLY* hosed for SSH not to get through.

But that's enough about SSH ;) I agree with a sentiment in another thread... Windows: It can do anything Linux can do, except it's expensive! I would throw in slow, difficult to repair when something goes wrong, hardware hungry (ram and CPU requirements are rediculous).

Now, don't get me wrong... I'm not anti-ms. I have in the past and will likely again worked FOR microsoft. I have been developing software for the MS platform for going on 15 years. There are niches that Windows fills well. To spout off that Linux has no advantages over Windows though is blatently false. Windows really falls short in the areas of price, speed, development resources, and most server uses. Linux falls short in laptop usage and *WAY* short on ease of configuration and set up.