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A perfect marriage: YOU and Ubuntu 16.04

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

I'm also a fan of Solaris, having used it extensively in the past.

There is definitely a "Linux-first" trend in the world, and really it's not well deserved. I've noted many times how bad people are at technology selection for their next application, project, IT system, or datacentre. Linux is a default choice for a lot of people; they never stop and think about whether or not it really is a good fit for their requirements.

Running a datacentre on Linux means that the admins are forever having to check each and every kernel, library and application update to see if there's any important security patches they must adopt, and do a ton of regression testing every single time. That's not productive.

Sure, they can pay money to RedHat or Ubuntu to partially solve that problem, but then what's the point of using Linux in the first place? RedHat aren't exactly that great, and they're not cheap. They're not necessarily able to get a good answer either because despite their best efforts they don't fully control Linux. And then they force things like SystemD onto everyone, making a whole load more problems...

Contrast that with Solaris, or even FreeBSD. There's only one place to look for information, and the people behind it really know their stuff. And because the documentation is good there's generally less need to pick up the phone in the first place. And because there's only one FreeBSD and one Solaris, the whole patch, update, regression thing is easier; if one admin says something is good on their installation it'll probably be good on one's own.

Cost

Microsoft used to bang on about total cost of ownership. Ok, so the actual total cost of ownership is very much an individual thing, but choosing Linux does not guarantee that you've also chosen lowest cost.

Open source really struggles to do big stuff quickly in an organised way and can easily get left behind. ZFS, DTRACE, all took a long time to kinda-imitate in Linux. Linux itself has benefited massively from corporate contributions (from Intel, IBM, RedHat, etc), and would be a shadow of its current self without them.

To me cost is less about how much the license cost and more about the price one pays in not having things like proper file systems, excellent system debugging tools, rapid access to accurate documentation and support from the people who wrote it. With all of that in place one can really do things quickly and properly.

The closest you get to that in Linux is a so-so and late imitation of a file system, FTRACE which may or may not have been compiled in, a load of junk from non-experts on Linux forums, support from people who may have read a bit of the source code and charge a fortune to go an read it a bit more, and so much fragmentation that there's no possibility of a sensible one-stop shop.

I think the FreeBSD people have made the best job of it by making it possible to sensibly adopt things that have been given away like ZFS and DTRACE, and by choosing to remain united behind a single version. The end result is useful.

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