Linux is more than just distros
What about all those appliances out there? How would you even know if Sudo was included?
About 2-3 years ago all we had was couple of Kemp load balancers and a Netezza from IBM running CentOS. Now around 100 of our VMs out of an estate of 700 devices are running a flavour of Linux and there is a lot of different flavours, with, I would imagine, a raft of differnet added on open source libraries.
We have no central management, patching or any idea what is actually installed, we rely totally on vendors supplying patches in a timely manner and many of these will have variable skill sets and willingness to support older stuff.
Linux are great untill something like this and you have to go in and tell your security teams whether you have patches or not and you have to spend days digging through support docs and finding information and patching all your appliances etc on a system by system basis, Some of our appliances are running CentOS 4/5 which went out of support a few years ago. For the grunts at the coalface it is a complete pain to keep on top of it all.
Windows by comparisson is a complete breeze to manage as it is only one flavour of OS to manage and lots of free and lots of expensive but easy to use tools and lots of reporting to keep the well paid people happy.
Linux is great, its all the other stuff that comes along for the ride and the custom distros that are a real pain and where the quality starts to fall away.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
