RE: OT: What OS

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxx>]

>Can you find a copy of Windows that you can purchase and use
*legally*
>for anything near the price of the Linux distributions on, say,
>
>  http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/cheap.html

Of more concern to me is Microsoft's rather nasty tendency to impose
ever
greater restrictions. the Open 6 licensing scheme is just a joke. It's
going
to cost people a lot of money. :( (did I mention that my company is
actually
a microsoft certified partner?)

This nonsense of skulking around trying to stop schools from taking
donated
PCs and sticking linux (or anything else for that mater) on them, or of
trying to stop sales of PC's without OSes is also rather omonious..


>IMNSHO, there's no way Windows is "easier to administer" than
Linux
>(or any other UNIX variant), either.  Windows may have a
pretty
>point'n'drool interface, but that doesn't make it any easier to
secure
>and maintain a machine over a long period.

I agree. Windows is easier for an administrator to *get wrong* because
it
all seems so obvious. IME you need a considerable amountof knowledge
about
the registry and the function of key subsystems to administer a Windows
installation with anything like the stability needed.

>As an example, updates issued by Microsoft can break other software
running
on the
> machine (there was an instance of a security update breaking Lotus a
while
back
> -- if you're using Lotus for your web services, you were then
somewhat
> stuck).  That kind of thing is near unheard of in the UNIX
community.
> UNIX, on the other hand, does have a somewhat more arcane command
line
> interface that can be time-consuming for the newcomer to learn.

Errr, not quite true actually. There was a case recently of a new build
of
OpenSSL right royally mucking up existing builds of OpenSSH, which many
webhosters now use to provide access rather than telnet. That's a
simple
update applied by an administrator, which broke an unrelated susbsystem.
And
it actually (in contrast to the Linux Mythos) took longer to fix than
it
took MS to produce SP6a to resolve the Notes problem.

>Generally, I don't think either OS is easier to administer than the
>other.  Mostly it's a question of what you're used to.

For me the behaviour of Microsoft and the costs involved in licensing
windows products are the main issue. Administrators still need to be
highly
skilled people.

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