A CIO's View of Ubuntu

onehitwonder writes "Well-known CIO John Halamka has rigorously tested six different operating systems over the course of a year in an effort to find a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows on his laptop and his company's computers. Here is CIO.com's initial writeup on Halamka's experiences; we discussed their followup article on SUSE. Now CIO is running a writeup on Halamka's take on Ubuntu and how it stacks up against Novell SUSE 10, RHEL, Fedora, XP, and Mac OS X, in a life-and-death business environment." For the impatient, here's Halamka's conclusion: "A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008."

Comments

Well known?

[Nick of NSTime]

I've never heard of him.

Re:Well known?

[ak3ldama]

And you sir, are the metric by which all peoples popularity is measured.

almost everything is "niche business application"

[boguslinks]

For the impatient, here's Halamka's conclusion: "A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008."

The problem is, people have been writing Windows-specific business apps for a long time, and MS Office itself is a critical business application in corporate-land. The overwhelming majority of computer users at every company I've been at has been somewhat-to-very nontechnical folks running Office and other Windows-specific software.

So, Halamka's analysis is not encouraging.

Re:heh

[good soldier svejk]

it sounds like part of it was that he likes gnome better than kde for his own use. i wonder if he knows he can run either on whatever distro he would like. -- i know there was more to it than that, but i thought that was an interesting facet of the description.

His analysis of the interfaces is spot on. Suse hasn't shipped with KDE as the default environment for years. It uses a very customized GNOME which functions a lot more like Windows. For instance, by default the main launcher shows your most recently used apps. It looks different every time you use it. Also the management tools, some of which are GNOME and some of which are Yast panels, are not consistently placed and can be difficult to navigate. He thought the default Ubuntu GNOME implementation was much better laisd out. And he knows you can change either one to look like whatever you want, but why should he have to when Ubuntu gets it right in the first place?

However, the big difference between the two distros is that Yast sucks and Synaptic, aptitude and friends are great. That also comes up in the article.

Re:Not a realistic scenario

[duplicate-nickname]

Exactly. Most IT departments are already support 2 or 3 versions of Windows on 4 or more hardware platforms. Throw in the occasional Mac for the graphic artists and support is already becoming tough. Now add in 2 more flavor of Linux (not to mention 2 or more versions of each), and you have a real nightmare.

We're not just talking about supporting the OS, but also the business applications that would run in each of those environments. Sure more things are going web based, but 75% of what we do is still on desktop applications.

Re:Not a realistic scenario

[businessnerd]

You are correct, companies do like to standardize. However, RTFA. The conclusion addresses your concerns.

Halamka's plans to support three different desktop operating systems may sound crazy. After all, the decision flies in the face of standardization, which seeks to decrease costs and complexity. But deploying different operating systems makes sense for the enterprise his IT group is supporting. "Hospitals and academic medical centers and universities are like the United Nations," he says. Just as you can't force all the diplomats at the UN to speak English, Halamka can't force all of his users to use the same OS. He realizes they have different computing needs and some, such as the researchers at the medical school, have their own grant money that they use to purchase whatever computers they want. The "multicultural" computing environment that CareGroup and Harvard Medical School maintain may become more common as Linux-based operating systems improve and as IT departments bump up against tech-savvy users who increasingly bring their personal devices into the workplace. Standardization may one day become a relic of the corporate IT's crusty past.

Standardization may be good for some, but technological diversity may be better for others. Afterall, your employees should use the best tool for the job. That may be Windows or it may be Linux. Also, the more enterprises start mixing OS's, the more demand there will be for them to communicate with one another. This means a higher demand for open standards. While most of the savings of standardization is from only needing an IT staff with a knowledge of one system, another big chunk of it is from not having to make many different OS's and devices play nice together. If it became expected that your IT staff have a working knowledge of all of the most popular OS's, then standardization starts saving less and less money over a diverse IT environment.