I met Linus online in the early 90's and saw that he was on to something. After a few years we ported our databases we were running on SCO to Linux. I've had some linux machines with uptimes of almost 2 years and they would have had longer uptimes except we had to move them. And this was 5+ years ago. Those systems used numerous SCSI drives and were under constant load.
Today I have numerous Linux servers with databases running on Linux that average 28 record changes a second 24/7 on databases that have 100's of millions of working parts. Besides Linux I have Windows based servers that we mainly use for web services. While these systems are much more stable than ever I'd never consider using any Windows product to run our databases on.
In 10+ years I have never had a server fail due to the Linux OS. Not once. Linux has been very very good to me both technically and financially.
I had no idea until I read your post I was a "hobbyist".
heh--of course you are--just like Oak Ridge National Labs.
One of the problems I keep seeing people have is making changes to the system. Great strides have been made the last few years in making setup a snap, but package/installer management is still very hit-or-miss.
Most folk aren't going to have a lot of desire to grep through man pages chock full of some programmers favorite Lingua Obscura or l33t sp3@k.
Works for me though. ;-)
That’s an excellent testimony. What distro do you use?