Thanks for stopping by.

I work for a Class A railway and am part of a team that manaages hundreds of servers of various platforms (mainly, Windows, Unix(AIX) and mainframe) and over 400 custom written applications. Although my IT training path was through WIndows Server, I’ve really come to respect Unix since working here.

I could respond with an article explaining 5 ways that Unix is better than Windows, and those reasons would in-fact have merit, however I won’t. I will, however provide a single statement that, if expanded on, says everything.

– We flip the workloads on our HA Unix servers once every
3 months. Then we reboot them. Not because we need to,
simply because it allow us to perform maintenance and
testing on our HA clusters.

– We reboot ALL our Windows servers once every two weeks.
This is not by choice, but because we need to. This allows us to
plan, rather schedule an ‘outage’ in our HA environment. With
Windows Server, failure to schedule these ‘maintenance’ reboots
every two weeks increases the risks of an unplanned outage in
production. Anyone with IT experisnce knows why this is an issue
so I won’t go into explaining the complexities

My point is, this blog seems quite biased and fails to properly compare the operating systems being reviewed.

Overall, I couldn’t agree more, even though it is hard to find a balance, and usually people are very biased.

Some people leave windows as a platform, discover Linux and start seeing everything upside down, just because. This the psychological/subjective dimension of it, that has to do with rebellion from any form of authority etc. So basically it’s only natural that one should start using Linux and feel more “free”. The only problem is, not to stop there.

I see this as a classic example of a Hegelian dialectic – we all start using Windows, since it’s ubiquitous, then some of us rebel like Neo in the Matrix, they want to be free and move out, so you do that and then you realize that the world outside the Matrix is not quite as pretty as it seemed. So then you return to the Matrix and start living in it, only this time you move differently, because of the experience you had “outside of the box”.

(One could also relate to Plato’s Myth of the Cave in the Republic, the story of the prodigal son in the Bible etc., take your pick. )

So it takes a while before you realize that Linux is not all roses and Windows much better than event most Windows admins realize it is. (It’s so stupid when sometimes Linux admins mock at the Windows admins, and the average Windows admin looks with awe and envy at the other guy. But that also has an explanation – it has to do with the fact that Windows Administration is usually done in a GUI, whereas Linux in a CLI – hence another prejudice, yet pretty powerful – Linux must be better, since the level of expertise required is higher).

Windows comes in binary format, so you don’t have access to the source code, cannot recompile the kernel everyday etc. – hence another prejudice. (The fact that you cannot do that doesn’t make the system better or worse.)

The market share supports that too – like you said, has nothing to do with conspiracy theories marketing or monopole – it’s a free market, let the best guys win. It’s better designed, more reliable, better integrated etc.

The products developed by Microsoft around the client and the server provide a real working environment – MS Office, Unified Communications, Exchange, AD, SQL, SharePoint, System Center etc.

Dave Cutler – the main man behind VMS/WNT – once said: “Unix is a junk operating system designed by a committee of Ph.D.s.”

Now, I wouldn’t go that far, since UNIX has become pretty standardized in the recent years, but with what cost! (See the Unix wars.) And Linux is doing the same mistakes again…

Microsoft doesn’t need to worry so much about Linux as a competitor, as long as they shoot themselves in the foot anyway. The Romans, when going to war, used to follow the strategy – divide et impera – divide and rule. Well, Linux does it to itself alone. No need for anyone to try and undermine Linux or whatever – it does a fairly fine job at that on its own.

Hell, Linux is just about as old as WinNT, yet NT dominates the market as a platform, because those guys tend to think, plan and design before they act – whereas Linux and open source are, how do they call it – “no design by design” How stupid is that? Then they come up with stupid excuses like – things have gotten to complex for one person to conceive it all.

Well then, if designing a system you have no guarantee of success, how much worse are things going to get if you don’t plan ahead?

I think there’s a lot of really smart people that got involved with UNIX/Linux over the years, – Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Stallman, Torvalds, Eric Raymond, Bill Joy – but that doesn’t change the situation; they didn’t work together as a team on the system, and sparks of genius here and there don’t add up to a well designed/integrated OS.

A bazaar is what it is, and you cannot compare it with a Gothic cathedral (to quote Raymond’s metaphor). People whine about their disks being fragmented under Windows, but they fail to see the fragmentation that eats Linux, like gangrene, from inside out, overall, as a system/platform. Ridiculous.

Unix has a few advantages of its own, but is generally too twisted (read, fucked up) to make a difference. It’s simplicity is an advantage, until it becomes a burden (when things tend to become simplistic); Unix tries to do one thing at a time and do it well (which is good), but then it’s rather one-dimensional (not so good) – think Mac OS X desktop experience. (I like Mac OS X, to be true, but it still feels kind of confined in there, compared to the Windows experience.)

WinNT is much more complex as a platform; complexity can lead to complications (see Multics), so one needs to be careful and find a balance. But all in all, it’s better positioned – facts speak for themselves; UNIX is older than VMS, and Linux is just about as old as WNT, and yet they have failed to catch up because of the chaotic way in which they have been developed; might be good for practice and research, as in a computer lab, but definitely no option in real life or production.

I used to think – Windows is the better choice on the desktop, Linux on the server. Now I know – Linux sucks both ways, Windows NT is a much better choice – as a client, as well as a server.

Still I run about a dozen Linux virtual machines on my machines, but my main platform is either Se7en nowadays (WinNT 6.1 to be precise) or Win Server 2008 R2 (same build). Both of which rock.

Linux has become sort of a playground for me lately – useful, you get to learn interesting things along the way, but that doesn’t change the situation overall at all.

Where is Linux better or shall we say comparable to Windows? On the server side, as long as we speak about a web or file server. The webhosting companies may be running Linux or FreeBSD, they’re both good at that one particular task But that’s that. And it’s not a lot. Actually, pretty little.

By the way – I don’t expect most of the Linux zealots posting here to understand this – they’re going through the rebellion phase now. It’s a necessary step, so let’s just bear our feelings for now; they will get it – hopefully – later.

Dixi et salvavi…

you may want to update it, now that se7en is out

df

Oracle is not better than Microsoft SQL Server just because I use Oracle, neither is Unix/Linux better that Windows, just becasue Bill Gates is making too much money and I am not.

Yep, it is an opinion piece. Most blogs are. It represents my experience, which is considerable. Thanks for reading.