On Oct 28, 2014, at 10:07 AM, Joshua Welker wrote:

> There are 2 reasons I have learned/am learning Linux:
> 
> 1. It is cheaper as a web hosting platform. Not substantially, but enough to
> make a difference. This is a big deal when you are a library with a
> barebones budget or an indie developer (I am both).  Note that if you are
> looking for enterprise-level support, the picture is quite different.
> 
> 1a. A less significant reason is that Linux is much less resource-intensive
> on computers and works well on old/underpowered computers and embedded
> systems. If you want to hack an Android device or Chromebook to expand its
> functionality, Linux is what you want. I am running Ubuntu on my Acer C720
> Chromebook using Crouton, and now it has all the functionality of a
> full-fledged laptop at $200.

When I worked for an ISP in the late 1990s, our two FreeBSD servers that
handled *everything* were 75MHz Pentiums that another company had discarded
Our network admin bridged my apartment to his using a 386 w/ picoBSD install
that booted from a 3.5" floppy (to drive a WaveLAN card, before the days of
802.11)  I think one of the P75s was running fark.com for a while before
they added all of the commenting functionality.

It's amazing just how much functionality you can get out of hardware
that people have discarded by putting a system on it that doesn't
have a lot of cruft.


> 2. Many scripting languages and application servers were born in *nix and
> have struggled to port over to non-*nix platforms. For example, Python and
> Ruby both are a major pain to set up in Windows. Setting up a
> production-level Rails or Django server is stupidly overcomplicated in
> Windows to the point where it is probably easier just to use Linux. It's
> much easier to "sudo apt-get install" in Ubuntu than to spend hours tweaking
> environment variables and config files in Windows to achieve the same
> effect.

If you're going to run Python on windows, it used to be easier to download
a full 'WAMP' build (windows, apache, mysql, perl/php/python).  I don't
know what the current state of python installers are ... except for on
the Mac, where they're still a bit of a pain.

I have no idea on Ruby.


> I will go out on a limb here and say that *nix isn't inherently better than
> Windows except perhaps the fact that it is less resource-intensive (which
> doesn't apply to OSX, the most popular *nix variant). #1 and #2 above are
> really based on historical circumstances rather than any inherent
> superiority in Linux. Back when the popular scripting languages, database
> servers, and application servers were first developed in the 90s, Windows
> had  a very sucktastic security model and was generally not up to the task
> of running a server. Windows has cleaned up its act quite a bit, but the
> ship has sailed, at this point.
> 
> If you compare Windows today to Linux today, they are on very equal footing
> in terms of server features. The only real advantage Linux has at this point
> is that the big distros like Ubuntu have a much more robust package
> ecosystem that makes it much easier to install common server-side
> applications through the command line. But when you look at actually using
> and managing the OS, Linux is at a clear disadvantage. And if you compare
> the two as desktop environments, Windows wins hands-down except for a very
> few niche use cases. I say this as someone who uses a Ubuntu laptop every
> day.

For managing OSes, I admit that I haven't played with Windows 8, but I'm
still in the FreeBSD camp for servers.  (and not what Apple's done to it)

Windows might have an advantage if you're doing active directory w/
group policies, but I've heard horror stories from my neighbor about his
co-worker who decides to 'hide' his changes to individual people (eg,
blocking what websites they can get to), making it difficult for someone
else to go in and clear them out because he was too over-zealous.


> (Anyone who has read this far might be interested to know that Windows 10 is
> going to include an official MS-supported command line package management
> suite called OneGet that will build on the package ecosystem of the
> third-party Chocolatey suite.)

Very interesting.

-Joe