On 13 February 2013 16:31, Ally Biggs <bluechrome@???> wrote:
> Do you guys ever think there will be a day that Linux will be as popular as Windows in the desktop market.
It's slowly happening. The US and Europe are not the only desktop
demographics. Asia and the third world are heavily embracing open
source. US/Europe has had the markets shaken up with tablets for
common computer tasks.
> I use both Windows and Linux have a strong interest in both but currently am having a tug of war with my thought patterns career wise. The majority of my thoughts are saying focus on learning Linux starting with Linux+ with the eventual aim of going for the RHCSE. The other half is saying go down the Microsoft route taking a client exam and going for the server 2012 admin certs.
I personally don't hire on certs. I want aptitude and experience. I've
seen kids who design and operate LAMP stack solutions for their World
of Warcraft guild in their spare time, outperform their competition
with Windows/Red Hat certs cover some administrative tools and tasks,
and OK as introductions to their relative eco-systems, but it doesn't
make you battle-ready. But if you had to get a certification in our
day and age, I would go for something around Virtualisation platforms.
Hyper-V, Xen, KVM, and ESXi are the most accessible for business, AWS
and Eucalyptus for web companies.
Learning Puppet for Linux, and Powershell for Windows would be much
more useful skills in my opinion.
> I would say that I enjoy Linux more the whole Open source ethos, I actually feel like I am learning when using the cli as opposed to clicking my way through the GUI in Windows.
The best Windows admins are the ones who can use CMD and Powershell to
administrate system(s). Change Management is very hard to control, and
implementation steps are impossible to reproduce flawlessly with a
GUI. Computers are after all for carrying out repetitive tasks.
> The thing which bothers me though about Linux ok it's free and if you have the skills you can do great things but why isn't it being adopted more for everyday use.
Money. Dell is a great example. They sell a product, this product has
related training and support materials for customer support. If a
customer diversifies from the products original attributes you are now
unable to receive any kind of useful support. Share holders will put
pressure on a company to make sure their end to end sales and support
resources are the absolute minimum required to make a buck. Now Dell
are going private they hope to change that, one great way to kill
innovation is to go public with your business.
>Also why don't the developers standardise a distribution for the home user i.e same package manager and packages.
That's what Ubuntu IS. And likewise CentOS/RHEL is pretty standard for
servers. But the point of open source code and permissive licensing is
that you don't have to follow anyone's standards and make your own. If
my only option to use Ubuntu was with Unity, I wouldn't be using
Ubuntu.
> The problem with desktop Linux I think is when the shit hits the fan and something needs to be configured or a driver needs to be added your average user isn't going to want to sit typing commands in a terminal or spending hours finding the solution into a community.
Wow this strikes close to the heart. For this answer I am not going to
be polite...
....Are you bloody joking? The worst thing about closed source systems
is when you are the edge case in a bug report, what the hell do you
do?
Directors don't like shrugs and "I dunno's" in emergency meetings.
This is what comes with using closed systems from ANYONE, Oracle, MS,
IBM, all you can do is open a support ticket and hope for the best.
Maybe that update will fix, maybe it will make it worst, it probably
wasn't a good idea in the first place but nothing was in place
(documentation, knowledge, consultancy) that said you
couldn't-and-you-did-and-it-broke.
Not even Platinum MS and Oracle support contracts are useful in those
nail biting situations. So your HP colour laserjet printer driver is
crashing an entire windows print server...now what? Your manager will
probably say "Well when I plug it into my laptop, my laptop doesn't
crash. Fix it.". And those blue screens, or multi-lingual grey screens
on OS X are soooooo useful.
On the flip side; with Linux/MySQL/Java stacks, I have the ability to
go so low level with my bug tickets and support cases I have actually
managed to have Oracle change documentation on several occasions.
These were generally caused by change I/my team was actually against,
but I couldn't prove otherwise without extensive testing, because no
formal explanation exists.
A week of stack traces, and tcpdumps, a couple of bug reports later ,
and documentation has been changed to reflect these crazy edge cases
to say "don't do this because X".
If I had a wheelchair to pry myself out of and a stick to wave I would!
> The other problem I found is the community alot of people expect you to be some kind of command line genius who is capable of reciting the whole encyclopaedia of man pages. So when you ask for help or guidance you often get a dismissive response.
I tell you what does work, "Linux sucks because X doesn't Y". Much
like my provocation in the previous answer, I get all angry war vet,
"You kids don't know nothing!".
We have all been there. It's been 12 years now for me with Unix and
Linux, what's really changed is the way I approach a problem, my
search syntax, and my question, does the rubber ducky on your desk
agree? Please see my footnote on recommended reading.
> Documentation is horrendous aswell especially if you are making the transition from Windows. Pick up a starting to learn Linux book and a couple of pages in you end up with the worlds worst headache.
The documentation for various systems and services are generally
fantastic, show me a bad example. Often the documentation, testing and
implementation efforts are the most deserving and go unnoticed. I
don't use python much, but my goodness that's some great
documentation. Ubuntu have a good thing going too, you can actually
make a page for a particular hardware/software scenario or
combination, which is what we really want for all end user wiki's,
practical examples.
> So how did you guys learn Linux?
> Has anyone else made the transition from Windows? Or what are the key areas to focus on to develop a good foundation. Need some inspiration if I go down the Linux route would I be missing out on much? Please help me resolve the tug of war it is driving me mad :)
I had heard of Linux. I first saw Red Hat 7.3 in a box on a shelf in
Virgin Megastore. I was a teenager and it was around £70. I knew I
wanted to try something else, I knew there were other computer
platforms out there doing very diverse, and sometimes very important
tasks. Whenever Pixar or Nasa went behind the scenes, you could see it
was all different. But £70? At 16? That was 2 Friday nights down the
pub.
After college I started working in IT, first job had LOTS of Unix. PIC
system on SunOS and I think some kind of AS/400 box. A guy there told
me Linux is actually free, and I can buy a book that comes with CD's,
jackpot!
"Teach yourself Red Hat Linux 9 in 24 hours", That's all I needed to
get going. I later learned about Linux Format magazine, which comes
with cover discs every month. My work after I dropped out of
University involved Linux, OS X, and IRIX. Then in 2005, for whatever
reason, Ottakers book chain were giving away copies of Ubuntu Linux
5.04. All my work from 2006 has involved Linux in someway. I still run
windows for gaming with friends. All my professional and personal
workstations, laptops, desktops servers etc...Linux.
Ally, you really need to pickup a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer, it
is by far the best computer related book I have ever read. Anyone at
any level, even if they don't do any kind of programming will find it
useful, I really wish I had it when I started working for companies
when I was young and frustrated by their terrible systems and work
ethics. I just didn't know how to approach the problem, and at the end
of the day that's all you need, the right approach.
http://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer
Linux is out there, it is a big deal, it's not going away. Oracle
(Sun) and MS are stagnating, and Apple have made the mistake of
becoming a commodity, one that is easy to compete against. £500 tablet
for web browsing and iPlayer? Or a £100 tablet? Brands don't cut it
for long. The majority of Ford Focus owners are not pining for a
Ferrari.
Rich
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