Windoze may be great, but I'm not going to learn a new OS only to lose functionality of stuff that I can string on a command line. And I try not to take any of it too seriously. After all, we don't last forever. ;)
/johnny
Our new mainframe will be a Linux boxen. I hope my JCL runs on it.
Every 5 years or so I like to load up Linux and play with it a bit to see how it’s doing. The last time I was able to download a copy of mandrake and run it off a thumb drive. What is the current most popular flavor of Linux that I can run off of a disk or thumb drive? It’s getting time to check it out again.
Let us not forget the massive contribution of Richard Stallman and GNU. Linux was developed as a kernel, not a complete OS. Regardless of Stallman's unsavory politics and personal style, his GNU software and licensing were absolutely critical to the success of Linux as an OS, and comprise the majority of the "Linux" OS software currently in use.
I met Linux when he was working on the early kernels.
Linux has been very very good to me. You would be shocked.
Didn’t someone post a similar article, what, every year for the past 15 years?
I remember being in college when Linus Torvalds posted in the old Usenet Minix group about an OS for the 386 he was working on. It was interesting times back then - Linux and William Jolitz’s 386BSD opened up a whole new world of programming fun for us coders, a non-trivial effect of the work that went into Linux and the BSD OSs.
Right now I have a Linux server, a Vista laptop and and XP desktop which is my main workday computer. I’ve obviously used newer windows versions, but for me I get zero added productivity from getting the latest and greatest.
The critical applications for me used to be Word, Excel, Access, Autocad, IIS for web server and Visual Studio. But LibreOffice removes the need for word and excel, I have Mysql (MariaDB) for access, Blender for 3d animation and video, Audacity for sound, Apache web server, and Netbeans to write Java GUIs. In short, the Microsoft thrill is gone and I’m going all Linux my coming computer upgrade.
As an IT professional that designs disaster recovery solutions, I can tell you that I have seen over and over again, customer after customer a wide shift in the
Server farms. There used to be a lot of HPUX, Solaris, AIX, BSD, and other nixes. Now I see Linux (mostly RedHat and Ubuntu) as the vast majority and only a scattering of other systems.
There is still some mainframe systems still but that is rapidly being transitioned out in favor of large clusters to handle high volume transactions. I also still see a fair amount of MS Server, mostly for AD and for MS SQL. I am even seeing Linux on the desktop starting to creep into the work space.
If someone was to ask me what certification to start with in IT, hands down I would recommend the RedHat or CompTia Linux certifications.
The problem with Linux is it prides itself on being geeky. Microsoft sells because of a more user friendly look and terminology and massive advertising.
Linux Mint as an example is better then Microsoft (IMHO) but until Linux has an Office program that works well with others using Microsoft Office and can also support the Windows programs out there easily they will still be in the basement.
For me the documentation is pretty good as seen here: http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
If only the major pc suppliers would switch or are they blocked?
These days, it's a no-brainer. If you need a webserver, you install a LAMP stack. Whenever a group asks to install something on IIS, we know there are going to be issues and headaches that you just don't have to deal with in the Linux world, because it generally means you have an app from a vendor that is married to microsoft in a faggy kind of way.
Nice article. I’ve seen quite a few people save their XP machines with a Linux OS distro. Researching what distro fits your hardware makeup of your computer is the first thing I do. I’ve got mine down to Ubuntu first, then ZorinOS and Mint. For lighter hardware computers, Zorin Lite, Lubuntu, and Peppermint.
I’ve been using Linux OS’s for about 5 years now and really not too many problems. For everyday computing, I can do just about anything in Linux that I could do in MS Windows. I dual-boot Linux and Windows on one machine but I rarely have to use the Windows side of things.
CGato
Linux all day every day for me. If I need a windoze app it’s on a VM of one sort or another. Libreoffice is fine for simple things but for industry use MS apps are the gold standard and then I use a VM and life is good.