Yep tried that as well. LOL.
It all comes down to the fact that Linux really is not ready for prime time. There are out-standing stability issues, lack of commercial tools to support it and generally a multitude of thought on “best practice”.
The biggest issue is the support that is required just to “make it work”. I can have a Windows box up and running in less than 3 hours, a Linux box, not so much.
I not a Windows fanboy, far from it, I’ve been in the IT industry for over 20 yrs and have worked with pretty well all there is to work with. However, at this point of my life, I really don’t want to play around and promise my bosses that an opsys can do a job that it is just not cabable of doing.
Take for example file and print sharing. If anyone can convince me that Linux can do it better than Windows, I’ll gladly switch. However when I can train a help desk person in five minutes on Windows, you got a lot of convincing to do.
The biggest issue is the support that is required just to “make it work”. I can have a Windows box up and running in less than 3 hours, a Linux box, not so much.”
I can have my Ubuntu 8.04 with a clean install up and running in an hour.
> It all comes down to the fact that Linux really is not ready for prime time.
I disagree. Possibly more significantly, IBM disagrees — they are giving up their own OS in favor of Linux, a process that started ten years ago now. If you’re arguing that IBM is no longer a going concern, well... between you and IBM, I know which company I’d rather have stock in.
I also have been in the IT industry for more than 20 years. At home, I have Mac and Linux servers, but my main machine is a laptop PC running Windows — because I must have Windows when I interact with people like you — with my real work done in Linux virtual machines. Because Windows is such a dog, it *must* be the host until I get a laptop with virtualization technology built in. In the nearly four years I’ve used this laptop, I’ve had to reinstall Windows three times — in three machines running Linux in that time (one physical and two virtual), I have *once* reinstalled Linux — and that was by choice, because I wanted to standardize on one distribution.
I wouldn’t use a Windows server if I had any choice at all — having been a consultant for more than ten years, I have watched Windows servers actually nearly close two different small companies. When Unix servers are in use, then typically the only problems are human error... and a decent backup strategy is all you need for recovery.
Setup times, like all other tasks, depend on what you are familiar with. If you want printer and file sharing, if you’ve installed any recent GUI-based distribution, you can do it pretty much the same as you do on Windows: look for “Network”, then “Sharing”, in the menus.
If you can’t get a good Linux person, there’s a problem with your interview process, not the lack of candidates.