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

Re:Ubuntu? Power users?

[cerelib]

Ubuntu still contains most of the command line maintenance utilities. So if you learn how to use them, you can do remote administration. On the other hand, as long as your network latency isn't horrible, you can use the GUI tools remotely. This can be done using either VNC or X. I use X clients remotely all of the time from my Windows laptop using Xming, an X Server for Windows. Just make sure you use port forwarding in your SSH session and you are good to go.

Re:A genius!

[good soldier svejk]

And I wouldn't think SUSE and Ubuntu are really all that different from a support perspective. Not sure why he thinks OSX is better for researchers, though. I tried looking at the article for more information, but I'm not going to wade through 17 pages of ads...

Having been part of this evaluation process, I can tell you that Ubuntu is much easier to support, but Novell offers far better enterprise support (including developer resources) for Suse, which is more important for the applications he proposes. I won't speak for John, but my guess is he thinks OS X is better for researchers because it it runs all the unixy apps the researchers require and even in its most wild and wooly user installed form is easily supportable by our existing resources. You can read the first article for more information. As John points out in the article, we have no control over what researchers buy with their grant money anyway. Except for a few "power users" who prefer GNU, there is pretty much concensus among researchers that OS X is the best platform for them. At any rate my experience here has been that there is no net cost to supporting OS X since our marginal cost for supporting Macs is lower than Windows boxes. OTOH, it probably isn't as good for kiosk workstation applications because of the lack of low end hardware options. In that application, where distributed support is a small fraction of cost, the best route is to keep capital cost to a minimum, which means GNU.

If you don't want all the annoying ads, click the "print" link and read it on one page. That is what I did.

Re:Can anyone confirm?

[TheRealMindChild]

I don't know about evolution specifically... hell, my little blurb is coming from a windows world, but I figure programmers are programmers and they tend to make the same mistakes.

For example, if your firefox directory is read only, it takes MINUTES to fire up. Allow write access, it loads in a handful of seconds. Doing a little digging, it seems it is trying to open all of these config files for read/write... and when it fails, it tries a few more times. Then some of them get copied to $temp$ so that they CAN be opened for read/write, even though YOU LIKELY WON'T EVEN BE WRITING TO THEM. All it would take is a "if CantOpenConfigFileWithReadWrite(...) OpenConfigFileForReadOnly(...);"

And I use firefox as an example, but just about every application seems to have the same issues. This may be where Evolution is at.

Re:A genius!

[Ichoran]

As a researcher, I think it depends on the field.

If you need to run specialized commercial software for data capture or analysis, you need Windows. Very few companies support anything else. Those that do (e.g. National Instruments) offer only a subset of their tools which aren't well integrated into the platforms.

If you just need a computer that is pretty and powerful and you don't have to worry about, you need OS X. Stuff just works; you can forget about the computing and focus on the research.

If you are in research that involves computation or statistics, you need Linux. The standard tools are more powerful and flexible than anything you can find under Windows, and the headache of getting these to work on a Mac more than offsets the slightly smoother interface in some areas.

And from what I've seen, researchers' preferences in these fields tend to follow the needs above. (People who are mostly interested in data collection/hardware interface generally prefer Windows, biology researchers generally like Macs, bioinformatics folks like Linux, etc..)