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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."
I've never heard of him.
This man is a genius! Obviously the main problem for CIOs switching from MS to linux is: What happens to the saved licensing costs? You don't want it cut from your budget because that will make you less important...
So this guy's answer: replace it with 4 different OS's! That's 4x the support staff! Might even require a budget increase! And headcount, oh more of that lovely headcount!
I suspect once this idea gets out it really will be the year of the linux desktop!
Now, I just have to figure out if I'm joking or not. I know I don't usually end every sentence with an exclamation mark...
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
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.
TFA is over 10 pages of 3 paragraphs...
http://www.cio.com/article/print/41140 is much nicer to read.
Sweet. And with my Macbook and a copy of Parallels, I can have them all.
That's the beauty of virtualization on the Intel Macs. You cease worrying about which OS is the best compromise; you simply use the best OS for the task at hand.
"The only other problem Halamka ran into was with MIDI music".
I can not take this man seriously anymore.
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.
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.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
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.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
ÕÕ
I'm not sure how you got modded insightful but SUSE Enterprise, which is what was used, defaults to GNOME. So it's GNOME vs. GNOME here.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
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.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
6 minutes? 20 seconds? Is that true? I use Thunderbird (on Kubuntu), and it starts up in a second. I can't imagine waiting that long for an email client to load up. What is it doing that takes so long? Is this typical behavior for Evolution?
...
Well, I've experimented with Evolution off and on for some years, on various chunks of hardware, and I'd say it is typical. Whenever you tell Evolution to do something, you can go to the kitchen, make coffee, and be back with a cup before the results are on the screen. After a while, you're really wired
Maybe there's some config problem that's wrong everywhere I've tried it, but I haven't seen enough clues to diagnose the problem. If anyone knows, especially if you have some fixes, you might try contacting the Evolution folks and tell them that this is a major barrier to getting their toy widely adopted.
It's not just me, either; I've mentioned this to a number of people who've tried Evolution a few times, and they report the same molasses-like slowness.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I have a hard time imagining why you would think there could be things that could not be done remotely.
As others have pointed out, you can do a lot of things (I would say every kind of maintenance) remotely over SSH. That basically allows you to do everything that doesn't require a graphical user interface. If you do need the graphical user interface, you're in luck, though. One of the hidden strengths of Unix is that GUI is provided by X, which can be accessed over the network. A convenient and secure way to do this is by tunenling it through SSH (try ssh -X user@host xterm, for example). Even if that isn't enough (e.g. because you're on a machine without an X server), you can even access your desktop through RFB.
Of course, you can't perform any maintenance that requires physical access to the machine remotely. However, in all my years working with *nix systems remotely, I have never needed physical access.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
You could run the Linux apps that did the number crunching (not high end physics stuff, but still datasets around a gig or more that took an hour or so).
You could run the visulaization software and model building softare, also Linux based.
You had shells to log into the Linux cluster if you needed access to more power.
Disk mounting and sharing was easy amongst other Macs, nfs clients, and even the PCs.
The entire Microsoft office suite ran. I realize OpenOffice provides all the same utilies, but most journals, conferences, and employers in our field require papers, abstracts, and resumes be submitted in Microsoft Word, and slides in Powerpoint. Other programs were not accepted, or, when tried, we ran into compatibility issues.
Photoshop ran really well for making figures.
So it wasn't uncommon for someone to be sitting at their computer running a job, building a model, putting the results in powerpoint, writing the figures in word, sending the results out on their integrated e-mail client, letting your advisor know all was well with a quick video conference through the integrated camera, all while listening to music on iTunes streaming off a neighbor's Mac through the library sharing feature, and all without any specific new training required.
For our group the hardware was expensive of course, but we made up for it by lab-wide shared software. If you bought your own Mac essentially all the software was free and you'd be up and running in an hour at full productiivty. This is one reason Macs do well in research environments. It's not that you couldn't rig a PC or a Linux box to do all of this, but it would take some serious effort and know how that many grad students outside a computer science/physics type have (we were a biochemistry and biophysics group), and university labs generally have little to no IT support. The Macs just work and you can get you research started with little thought to the computer on your desk that rarely crashes, and that is worth the extra cost of the hardware in a grant-driven environment anyday. (I mean, the Mac is $500-$1000 more than a comparably configured PC, but how much IT support can you buy over a period of 2-4 years for $500-$1000. . .not much, it pays for itself indirectly).
"As a pc support guy in a biggish company, I'm REALLY glad this guy isn't making decisions here. Supporting Windows, OSX, SUSE and Ubuntu, and getting it all to play nice together would be a nightmare. "
How do you figure? I didn't see any mention of Solaris in the mix, so there is no way it rises to the level of "nightmare".
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Now that I gone over some of my pet-peeves I want to cover some of my opinion of what makes Linux great.
For hardware support, this area has improved over the past several years. In Ubuntu it takes a couple of clicks to have 3D hardware support whereas it took a long process before. Used to be that I would have to live without a certain piece of hardware because of incompatibility but most of those concerns have been taken care of for the majority of the distributions. I could go over some of the terminal apps but I am talking about a desktop environment so apples and oranges.
Oh come one people, this seriously cannot be the real reason he wanted to switch OS. From the TFA and the introduction in CIO Magazine about the root cause of this change I seem to gather that John was annoyed with the updates that installed themselves and antivirus updates and so on. Any of these can be turned off or set to be manually installed later, and Windows instability? Yes, when you load it up with a hole bunch of applications, some legacy, some from vendors who don't know how to properly integrate their product with the OS, you might get some instability. Resolution to this sort of problems lies in application virtualization (see SoftGrid) or Terminal Services, or Citrix, which does incur bigger support costs, but maybe not as large as supporting >=4 OSes.
I cannot seriously see from the guy's description or even the CIO Mag's a real problem with the OS. I'd rather put this on account of his bias (also mentioned in TFA).
Please note that this is not in any way a bash of Ubuntu, SuSE, OS X or any other OS mentioned. I agree that they are more fit to do some jobs better than others. Hell, I even run Hoary Hedgehog on my old PC (converted to a sort of media-center). It's just the arguments are dubious.