10 Reasons Why You Should Adopt LINUX

Tech Zone ^ | 2005-08-20 | Hina Aman

[N3WBI3]

The odds of Sun going away / changing their mind is less than the odds of Redhat and/or Novell going bankrupt.

Sun has already decided once that they were dropping x86 Solaris, the odds they will do it again depends on the cost of processors not their love for the architecture.

As for Redhat its cash flow positive and have a growing customer base. If redhat *and* novell went under tomorrow I could still get it from IBM..

Solaris also have much better docs and support that RH or Novell.

Available, yes for the cost no. I dont pay Redhat all that much and had an Engineer on the phone in 5 minutes yesterday.

[tortoise]

if 99% of the world used linux do really think there wouldn't be any virus programs? HA!!!!!! no that's a good one.

Except that a HUGE number of servers on the Internet are Linux. It is as common in the data center as Windows servers.

Yet having worked in the data centers at many very large companies and seen everything under the sun running on the wild and wooly Internet, there are only two platforms that routinely get used like the village skank: Windows and PHP. I know, PHP is not an OS, but every single first-hand case was always through a PHP exploit. Which is why we never allowed PHP on our servers. That and I've seen Windows get exploited a dozen different ways over the years. Other than that, Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD boxes are pretty damn tight sans PHP. If Windows did not have a chronic problem with remote exploits and default configurations, it would not have the reputation it does.

[softwarecreator]

Hell find it soon enough..

HAHAHAHA ... is it just a coincidence that your "he'll" is spelled as "hell"?  Freudian slip?  =)

[Terpfen]

I once read that Linux said if he had known about the free BSD project he never would have bothered with Linux he would have joined them..

Exactly what I was thinking of when I commented. And I still think that in a lot of ways, BSD is a better OS than Linux: I really think that having so many distributions means that every distributor has to reinvent the wheel, despite sharing common kernel development. It's incredibly annoying, and BSD is starting to fracture as well: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, PCBSD... my biggest complaint about open source is the lack of unity in direction and development.

[N3WBI3]

1) I did not write the article

2) The Giants choosing some Linux, some Windows, and Some other *nix means they consider each to be viable but not perfect... is that what youre looking for?

[N3WBI3]

Part of the problem with BSD is that it has not scaled as well as Linux over time, and it started out ahead.

BSD is a far more capable Operating system than Linux in just about every facet (at the OS level)..

BSD is cleaner, no doubt about it, but BSD has had a lot of serious problems scaling to big hardware.

Its running on everything from Mainframes to Toasters.. If your talking about bleeding edge video and sound cards, well yea Linux might do a little better but not much..

The difference probably boils down to how the different projects were managed.

Its more because of all the legal fights in the late 80's and early 90's..

[N3WBI3]

OOoookay. So why have a second drive?

A critical OS failure could result in losing information and most 'recovery disk' overwrite the Operating systems complete harddrive. With a second hardrive containing documents this is not going to kill you.

Software raid really hurts performance, Nobody has put one together that I don't see significant hits against..

[softwarecreator]

The Giants choosing some Linux, some Windows, and Some other *nix means they consider each to be viable but not perfect... is that what youre looking for?

Yeah.  I just think whoever wrote the article spun that fact around a bit to look like they dumped all other OS's for Linux, which is usually not the case.  I have rarely worked on a project for a good size company that only used one OS.

Actually, this policy is a good thing for Linux.

[N3WBI3]

No I just dont give a crap about punctuation on FR..

[N3WBI3]

I really think that having so many distributions means that every distributor has to reinvent the wheel, despite sharing common kernel development.

Its not just common kernel, its common gui's, common browsers.. Most distro's dont write any of their own code they just package it. The only ones who write any would be Redhat & Novell..

[N3WBI3]

See http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1470958/posts

[tortoise]

Its running on everything from Mainframes to Toasters.. If your talking about bleeding edge video and sound cards, well yea Linux might do a little better but not much..

I've used BSD for for many, many years, including a number on FreeBSD which is the BSD equivalent of Linux.

There is no OSS BSD scales remotely as well on big hardware -- the kernels are not up to the task yet -- and commercial BSD has been abandoned for the most part (thankfully). While I genuinely love FreeBSD as a system, it kind of sucks for anything but your basic network serving type tasks compared to Linux 2.6. Linux does SMP much better and has become quite competent at NUMA architectures, whereas BSD is quite weak in that area. The BSD file system is pretty good, but not great. If I was depending on filesystem performance and scaling, I'd want to be looking for XFS.

FreeBSD is a cleaner architecture, but it cannot keep pace with the frantic development rate of Linux features, and is lagging further and further behind. If they come up with a FreeBSD version that genuinely knows how to schedule and do memory management on big AMD64 systems, I'll be back there in a heartbeat. But right now, it doesn't.

[softwarecreator]

But to be fair Ive seen just as many shops that have Linux servers with only three (/boot, /, and a swap) which is about as bad..

I did this the first time I installed Mandrake.  Luckily when I re-installed it I changed it.

[Michael Barnes]

Well, internal mirror, or external disk packs or SAN, a critical OS failure is gonna hurt you anyway; the data being worked on is going to be worked on "locally" and if the OS goes toes up, bye, bye whatever was being worked on (Hasn't thought this one through; where are the journal's stored for "playbacks" upon critcal crashes? --heading off to google-- ).

I'm not thinking datacenter, I'm thinking home use. I built a machine for Linux and have not noticed any loss of performance due onboard software mirroring. Hell, maybe my MB is better than I thought!!?

[Nateman]

"slap in another hard drive"

I was thinking of pulling out the drive that had the data I wanted and put it in another Windows computer as an alternate drive, where I pull off the data I want then partition it for Linux.

[N3WBI3]

Thats not a terrible desktop config (because Linux is much more forgiving of a 99.99% full disk) but I always create a small partition (1.5GB) for nightly backups...

[Terpfen]

Then what exactly is the point of multiple distributions, besides their installers? I can just imagine a Windows user hearing about "that Windows Linux thing" and wanting to try it, and then trying to figure out what the heck is the difference between Debian and Ubuntu.

[N3WBI3]

Well, internal mirror, or external disk packs or SAN, a critical OS failure is gonna hurt you anyway; the data being worked on is going to be worked on "locally" and if the OS goes toes up, bye, bye

Yes but on the desktop the paper I finished last night will still be on hda2 so when I run the 'repair' disk that overwrites hda1 I still can recover the last two months of work I have been doing and maybe lose a few hours of work

I'm not thinking datacenter, I'm thinking home use

As am I, data center requires hardware raid and vvr to another box hopefully in another building. 15minutes data loss is about the most I will tolerate if my data center is hit by a meteor..

I built a machine for Linux and have not noticed any loss of performance due onboard software mirroring. Hell, maybe my MB is better than I thought!!?

Well Mirroring via software raid level 1 will give you as good if not better reading (depending on how your controllers are setup) but you'll take a write hit. I was more thinking of RAID 5, so maybe I was off topic with my initial assertion..

[N3WBI3]

Then what exactly is the point of multiple distributions

Consumer choice? Why does ford release so many models of cars when they are 99% the same thing?

Some people really like KDE, some Like Gnome, and some prefer more lightweight GUI's. Some people like RPM for package management, some like APT, and some like to build from code. The different distros are fine tuned for different people.

I can just imagine a Windows user hearing about "that Windows Linux thing" and wanting to try it, and then trying to figure out what the heck is the difference between Debian and Ubuntu.

Most Linux users stumble onto a distro and stick with it. I am a RedHat guy, Its what I use, probably because the person who really got me into Linux was a redhat user. Its what I cut my teeth on (RH7).

But truth be known it does not matter what distro a user stumbles onto because when they become comfortable enough with Linux they will want to try other distros... (Im playing with Novell's open Suse).

[Terpfen]

Good points all, and I hadn't considered those avenues, though I think Linux/BSD developers should look at how NeXT/Apple created OS X. They could probably learn what to do, and what not to do.