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A CIO's View of Ubuntu

Posted by kdawson on Tue Jul 31, 2007 02:41 PM
from the sweet-spot dept.
Businesses Operating Systems Software Linux IT
onehitwonder writes "Well-known CIO John Halamka has rigorously tested six different operating systems over the course of a year in an effort to find a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows on his laptop and his company's computers. Here is CIO.com's initial writeup on Halamka's experiences; we discussed their followup article on SUSE. Now CIO is running a writeup on Halamka's take on Ubuntu and how it stacks up against Novell SUSE 10, RHEL, Fedora, XP, and Mac OS X, in a life-and-death business environment." For the impatient, here's Halamka's conclusion: "A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008."
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[+] A CIO's View of SUSE's Enterprise Viability 184 comments
onehitwonder writes "As part of an ongoing quest to find a viable alternative to the Microsoft desktop in the enterprise, well-known healthcare CIO John Halamka spent a month using Novell SUSE 10 as his sole operating system. His conclusion? It's good enough for the enterprise. In Windows vs. Linux vs. OS X: CIO John Halamka Tests SUSE, he explains how SUSE stacks up against RHEL, Fedora, XP and OS X (in a life-critical business environment), and which issues should influence an enterprise-class organization to adopt it."
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  • Well known? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nick of NSTime (597712) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @02:43PM (#20061967)
    I've never heard of him.

  • A genius! (Score:5, Funny)

    by niceone (992278) * on Tuesday July 31 2007, @02:46PM (#20062003) Journal

    This man is a genius! Obviously the main problem for CIOs switching from MS to linux is: What happens to the saved licensing costs? You don't want it cut from your budget because that will make you less important...

    So this guy's answer: replace it with 4 different OS's! That's 4x the support staff! Might even require a budget increase! And headcount, oh more of that lovely headcount!

    I suspect once this idea gets out it really will be the year of the linux desktop!

    Now, I just have to figure out if I'm joking or not. I know I don't usually end every sentence with an exclamation mark...

    • So this guy's answer: replace it with 4 different OS's! That's 4x the support staff! Might even require a budget increase! And headcount, oh more of that lovely headcount!

      Realistically, many companies that employ graphics people already have both Macs and Windows users. And I wouldn't think SUSE and Ubuntu are really all that different from a support perspective. Not sure why he thinks OSX is better for researchers, though. I tried looking at the article for more information, but I'm not going to wade thr

      • Re:A genius! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by good soldier svejk (571730) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @03:10PM (#20062343)

        And I wouldn't think SUSE and Ubuntu are really all that different from a support perspective. Not sure why he thinks OSX is better for researchers, though. I tried looking at the article for more information, but I'm not going to wade through 17 pages of ads...
        Having been part of this evaluation process, I can tell you that Ubuntu is much easier to support, but Novell offers far better enterprise support (including developer resources) for Suse, which is more important for the applications he proposes. I won't speak for John, but my guess is he thinks OS X is better for researchers because it it runs all the unixy apps the researchers require and even in its most wild and wooly user installed form is easily supportable by our existing resources. You can read the first article for more information. As John points out in the article, we have no control over what researchers buy with their grant money anyway. Except for a few "power users" who prefer GNU, there is pretty much concensus among researchers that OS X is the best platform for them. At any rate my experience here has been that there is no net cost to supporting OS X since our marginal cost for supporting Macs is lower than Windows boxes. OTOH, it probably isn't as good for kiosk workstation applications because of the lack of low end hardware options. In that application, where distributed support is a small fraction of cost, the best route is to keep capital cost to a minimum, which means GNU.

        If you don't want all the annoying ads, click the "print" link and read it on one page. That is what I did.

        • Re:A genius! (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Ichoran (106539) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @03:55PM (#20062943)
          As a researcher, I think it depends on the field.

          If you need to run specialized commercial software for data capture or analysis, you need Windows. Very few companies support anything else. Those that do (e.g. National Instruments) offer only a subset of their tools which aren't well integrated into the platforms.

          If you just need a computer that is pretty and powerful and you don't have to worry about, you need OS X. Stuff just works; you can forget about the computing and focus on the research.

          If you are in research that involves computation or statistics, you need Linux. The standard tools are more powerful and flexible than anything you can find under Windows, and the headache of getting these to work on a Mac more than offsets the slightly smoother interface in some areas.

          And from what I've seen, researchers' preferences in these fields tend to follow the needs above. (People who are mostly interested in data collection/hardware interface generally prefer Windows, biology researchers generally like Macs, bioinformatics folks like Linux, etc..)

          • Re:A genius! (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Gromius (677157) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @04:47PM (#20063547)
            Also as researcher (high energy particle physics, so very heavy on the computation and stats) I noticed that 50% - 80% of my colleagues own a mac laptop of some variety and that this is common though out the field. However they are used primary as an interface to our linux servers which are actually used to do the stats/computation. Apparently they are unixy enough having X windows and a terminal to be able to do this (unlike windows which always feels like a hack) while having that "It Just Works" ease of use. Although to be honest I often find that when interfacing with linux the mac is more like "It Just Works (well almost works, apart from a few fiddly things that you can probably learn to live without)" so I tend to avoid them myself.
    • I suspect once this idea gets out it really will be the year of the linux desktop!

      2008 is gonna be the year of Windows, OS X, SuSE and Ubuntu on the desktop!

      Seriously, though, it seems that what he's calling the difference between SuSE and Ubuntu is actually the difference between KDE and GNOME. At a minimum, it's the difference between their default desktop configurations. I'm not sure I'd trust this guy as a Linux expert, however "well-known" he may be.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by R2.0 (532027)
        "I'm not sure I'd trust this guy as a Linux expert, however "well-known" he may be."

        Sigh...

        The whole point is that he is NOT a Linux expert, just like the other 99% of us out here in userland. Just like 95% of us are not Windows "experts". Allow me to clue in the 1%:

        1) I don't care about KDE and Gnome either, nor do I care to know.
        2) I don't want to be an "expert" at either system, but that doesn't mean I can't form opinions about how well something works for me or my organization.

        It sounds like the Ubunt

        • Re:A genius! (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Otter (3800) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @03:24PM (#20062543) Journal
          The whole point is that he is NOT a Linux expert, just like the other 99% of us out here in userland.

          No, but he's a CIO publicly holding forth on the suitability of one Linux over another for certain applications based on the failure to understand that you can change the desktop environment! Maybe I'm a Linux snob but that seems like a striking lack of understanding. It's not like he was complaining about the lack of some obscure functionality and I chimed in with "its fixed in CVS so stop spredding FUD you M$ a$troturfer"!

          • No, but he's a CIO publicly holding forth on the suitability of one Linux over another for certain applications based on the failure to understand that you can change the desktop environment! Maybe I'm a Linux snob but that seems like a striking lack of understanding. It's not like he was complaining about the lack of some obscure functionality and I chimed in with "its fixed in CVS so stop spredding FUD you M$ a$troturfer"!

            No, he actually understands the situation much better than you. For one thing, he

            • Re:A genius! (Score:4, Interesting)

              by xenocide2 (231786) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @09:42PM (#20066101) Homepage

              The important question was how the two distributions performed without massive re-engineering.
              When I read CIO evaluations, I expect a perspective that includes how organizations can create and deploy changes to the base platform. I know places that revert the Windows XP theme to "Classic", as it's more familiar to their people. If you're considering deploying Linux, you would do well to consider hiring a Linux expert to help you with such things, just as you hire Windows experts. Honestly, I understand your compatriot didn't write this article, but the level of detail offered is no substitute for expert advice. Perhaps there's a whitepaper report for sale in the works?

              There are some important problems to recognize, although I hope you can pardon my amazement that people still want to listen to MIDIs at all. MIDI playback in Ubuntu is not as simple as it could be. While I don't know why this matters as an evaluation of 40,000 user base suitability, it might be the best example for the state of Ubuntu usability. At the moment, MIDI is recognized as a music filetype by GNOME, but gstreamer (and totem as a consequence) can't handle it. So first instinct when something doesn't work is to check the repos. There are 87 hits for "midi" in my apt-cache search. Once you exclude the libraries and random extra hits for midi maze clones and the like, you get about ten options. The first one is kmid. kmid looks like it would work out great in kubuntu, but I'm guessing it can't handle the lack of artsd running in the background or something, as I heard no sound. The last one on the list is timidity++. It works fine on the command line, but even if you install the extra interfaces, the interface isn't that great.

              Gutsy (to be released in October) handles it slightly differently. If you double click to open a .mid, by default it opens up an install applications dialog, suggesting amarok or kmid. Timidity is tragically absent, and kmid still doesn't work after installation. Ideally, midi playback should be part of the gstreamer set of plugins, and MIDI would work out of the box with the default totem GUI. In practice, work has been done in gstreamer that basically ports timidity to the gstreamer framework [freedesktop.org] (as well as wildmidi, another midi library). This work was started in February 2007, so I can understand why it didn't make it into the current release. The better question, and one I don't immediately have an answer for, is why it's not yet hit development branch in Ubuntu. There exists a bounty to bring this functionality to life, so if anyone's looking to earn what appears to be around 200 dollars [launchpad.net], this whole problem could be wrapped up by October or sooner.

              As an aside, I do appreciate the implication that Debian is the mother of all Linux. And we should recognize that organizations, hired bounties, or outside firms like SuSE, can make these re-engineering feats simple via open source.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by AeroIllini (726211)

          I ditched the command line with Dos and Win3.1

          I agree with your post, I just wanted to share a bit of wisdom that I shamelessly stole from someone's sig.

          DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a Pinto is like an aircraft carrier.

          For your job, the command line is not very efficient, and a GUI is better. For a sysadmin, whose job involves lots of scripting and configuration, it is essential - and MS-DOS doesn't even hold a candle to what's possible in bash.

          But you're right... Linux fanatics can't expect everyone to edit xorg.conf by hand and apply

        • Re:A genius! (Score:5, Informative)

          by Doctor O (549663) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @06:12PM (#20064447) Homepage Journal

          Hell, I'm ready to make the switch to Ubuntu, but for my slavery to Quicken.

          Then switch to Ubuntu, download VMWare Server [vmware.com] (free as in beer), install your Windows license in a VM, put Quicken on it and be done. With the snapshots in VMware you can easily test install stuff and just roll back to the state before the install if you don't like the results. Burn the VM onto a DVD and never reinstall Windows again.

          "I would love to switch but I need $windows_app" is not a viable excuse anymore.

          If you need assistance with installing VMWare Server under Ubuntu, feel free to ask.
  • it sounds like part of it was that he likes gnome better than kde for his own use. i wonder if he knows he can run either on whatever distro he would like. -- i know there was more to it than that, but i thought that was an interesting facet of the description.

    • Re:heh (Score:4, Insightful)

      by good soldier svejk (571730) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @03:21PM (#20062507)

      it sounds like part of it was that he likes gnome better than kde for his own use. i wonder if he knows he can run either on whatever distro he would like. -- i know there was more to it than that, but i thought that was an interesting facet of the description.
      His analysis of the interfaces is spot on. Suse hasn't shipped with KDE as the default environment for years. It uses a very customized GNOME which functions a lot more like Windows. For instance, by default the main launcher shows your most recently used apps. It looks different every time you use it. Also the management tools, some of which are GNOME and some of which are Yast panels, are not consistently placed and can be difficult to navigate. He thought the default Ubuntu GNOME implementation was much better laisd out. And he knows you can change either one to look like whatever you want, but why should he have to when Ubuntu gets it right in the first place?

      However, the big difference between the two distros is that Yast sucks and Synaptic, aptitude and friends are great. That also comes up in the article.

  • almost everything is "niche business application" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by boguslinks (1117203) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @02:51PM (#20062075)
    For the impatient, here's Halamka's conclusion: "A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008."

    The problem is, people have been writing Windows-specific business apps for a long time, and MS Office itself is a critical business application in corporate-land. The overwhelming majority of computer users at every company I've been at has been somewhat-to-very nontechnical folks running Office and other Windows-specific software.

    So, Halamka's analysis is not encouraging.
    • MS Office. What are they going to do about that?

      Run it via WINE?
      Run it via Citrix?
      Use only the functionality common to MS Office and OpenOffice.org?
      Another option?

      There are lots of different ways to do it, but which of them is he taking and why?

  • Print view (Score:5, Informative)

    by ELProphet (909179) <davidsouther@gmail.com> on Tuesday July 31 2007, @02:52PM (#20062083) Homepage
    TFA is over 10 pages of 3 paragraphs...

    http://www.cio.com/article/print/41140 [cio.com] is much nicer to read.

  • Having your cake and eating it too ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by timholman (71886) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @02:54PM (#20062111)

    For the impatient, here's Halamka's conclusion: "A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008."

    Sweet. And with my Macbook and a copy of Parallels, I can have them all.

    That's the beauty of virtualization on the Intel Macs. You cease worrying about which OS is the best compromise; you simply use the best OS for the task at hand.

    • Sweet. And with my Macbook and a copy of Parallels, I can have them all. That's the beauty of virtualization on the Intel Macs. You cease worrying about which OS is the best compromise; you simply use the best OS for the task at hand.

      Actually, Halamka agrees with you. But he also needs a subnotebook and Apple doesn't make one. For work that requirement outweighs his preference for OS X. All this laptop needs to do is basic business stuff like email and presentations, and Ubuntu is more than good enough at

  • Good freaquin' googly.

    CIO.com sure has a hardon for online ad revenue. Seventeen pages for one article, the article itself taking up only 1/3 of the page real estate for each page. Talk about a pain in the ass to read.

    It's bad enough that nobody in Slashdot reads the actual articles. The next time I see a link to a CIO.com article, I'll just skip trying to read it, and go right to throwing down a random opinion based on the Slashdot summary.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by falconwolf (725481)

      CIO.com sure has a hardon for online ad revenue. Seventeen pages for one article, the article itself taking up only 1/3 of the page real estate for each page. Talk about a pain in the ass to read.

      That's simple to solve, just click the print link. It all is on one webpage. Unfortunately my browser print preview shows it's still 11 pages without changing any settings. But there's no ads.

      Falcon

  • Where I stopped reading (Score:5, Funny)

    by textstring (924171) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @03:06PM (#20062277)
    "The only other problem Halamka ran into was with MIDI music".
    I can not take this man seriously anymore.

  • Mac's in research (Score:5, Informative)

    by or-switch (1118153) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @04:15PM (#20063153)
    There was a quesiton in there as to why researchers seem to prefer Macs. When I was in grad school the Mac with OS X was a perfect machine for us. Everything we need could run on it.

    You could run the Linux apps that did the number crunching (not high end physics stuff, but still datasets around a gig or more that took an hour or so).

    You could run the visulaization software and model building softare, also Linux based.

    You had shells to log into the Linux cluster if you needed access to more power.

    Disk mounting and sharing was easy amongst other Macs, nfs clients, and even the PCs.

    The entire Microsoft office suite ran. I realize OpenOffice provides all the same utilies, but most journals, conferences, and employers in our field require papers, abstracts, and resumes be submitted in Microsoft Word, and slides in Powerpoint. Other programs were not accepted, or, when tried, we ran into compatibility issues.

    Photoshop ran really well for making figures.

    So it wasn't uncommon for someone to be sitting at their computer running a job, building a model, putting the results in powerpoint, writing the figures in word, sending the results out on their integrated e-mail client, letting your advisor know all was well with a quick video conference through the integrated camera, all while listening to music on iTunes streaming off a neighbor's Mac through the library sharing feature, and all without any specific new training required.

    For our group the hardware was expensive of course, but we made up for it by lab-wide shared software. If you bought your own Mac essentially all the software was free and you'd be up and running in an hour at full productiivty. This is one reason Macs do well in research environments. It's not that you couldn't rig a PC or a Linux box to do all of this, but it would take some serious effort and know how that many grad students outside a computer science/physics type have (we were a biochemistry and biophysics group), and university labs generally have little to no IT support. The Macs just work and you can get you research started with little thought to the computer on your desk that rarely crashes, and that is worth the extra cost of the hardware in a grant-driven environment anyday. (I mean, the Mac is $500-$1000 more than a comparably configured PC, but how much IT support can you buy over a period of 2-4 years for $500-$1000. . .not much, it pays for itself indirectly).

    • Not to mention that that extra dollar cost may push a Mac over the line into capital equipment where overhead isn't charged. My first laptop for work ran into that issue: I picked a nice model for ~$1800, and was told I wasn't spending enough. As it turned out, the $2600 ibm was cheaper, because the lower cost one came with 50% overhead attached.

      You could have also ssh'd into a real cluster, or built a Mac cluster for a price similar to an Opteron system, and just quietly integrated it with your deskto

  • Close but Limited (Score:5, Informative)

    by pravuil (975319) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @05:44PM (#20064201) Homepage Journal
    Most of his observations are actually spot on but he did fail to bring up several items that I believe need attention. These are things that need to be fixed in order to have a better product IMHO. I'm coming from my experience with Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE (SLE/open), Debian, and Mandrake (Mandriva). I have yet to test PCLinuxOS, CentOS, Mepis, Gentoo, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc. Whereas I'm not a so called "expert", I am a regular end user.

    • m4p format (all distros)
    • Evolution/Thunderbird sucks, Sylpheed/claws is close to anything that I would use. (all distros)
    • Codecs not verified to run on Linux listed here (http://soggie.soti.org/linux/linux-codecs/ [soti.org]), here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_ codecs#Operating_system_support [wikipedia.org]) and here (http://labs.divx.com/DivXLinuxCodec [divx.com]) are illegal to use without owning Windows. (all distros)
    • Flash properly displayed in web browser so it doesn't cover up page content. (all distros)
    • The UI in Ubuntu still has more bugs than Red Hat and SuSE.
    • Red Hat uses anaconda for the OS install which complicates the partitioning process.
    • YUM and Yast suck compared to Synaptic. Thankfully there is a RPM based version of Synaptic Package manager for Red Hat. I believe SuSE has it as well.
    • Updates for SuSE suck because of how long it takes and some hurdles you have to go through just to get the update started.
    • The most stable version out there, even with unstable packages, is Red Hat but Ubuntu fixes unstable packages faster than other distributions.
    • Updates for RPM based systems take longer than DEB based systems especially if you don't configure SELinux the right way.
    • MPlayer feels incomplete but does some neat things. Totem is fine but needs to have more options.

    Now that I gone over some of my pet-peeves I want to cover some of my opinion of what makes Linux great.

    • Beryl (Love it, makes the desktop easier to use)
    • OpenOffice (There are some things that can be improved but overall it works great)
    • Synaptic Package Manager / APT / APTitude (Great way for people to find out more of what Linux can offer to them depending on how their repos are configured)
    • Amarok (Best audio player out there for Linux. Has the ability to minimize to task bar, Options to turn on or off the OCD, works great for organizing online radio streams, plays Linux restricted formats fine and last but not least, it's pretty light weight.)
    • Firefox and it's extensibility (Most of the extensions are shared between OSs)
    • su (Once you got what you want set, you'll never have to use this again except for maybe updates depending on how you configured you package manager)
    • Complete control to customize the GDM, KDM or XDM
    • Gconf-editor saves time on configuring for people that don't want to know how to program to get something simple done
    • Sylpheed/Claws provides the most realistic extensions for an email client available on Linux (especially in terms of spam filters and how the mail is viewed / organized)

    For hardware support, this area has improved over the past several years. In Ubuntu it takes a couple of clicks to have 3D hardware support whereas it took a long process before. Used to be that I would have to live without a certain piece of hardware because of incompatibility but most of those concerns have been taken care of for the majority of the distributions. I could go over some of the terminal apps but I am talking about a desktop environment so apples and oranges.

  • Especially after he mentioned simply that his exotic eap network would not work and a 6 minute wait for email??

    If you use win32 apps then you need Windows. Standardization is important and I used to have Ubuntu on my laptop and love it. But I have XP now as I get ready for school with MBA majors who will be sending me excel and ms access files that openoffice would have trouble with.

    As many pointed out this CIO was a laughing stock 4 years ago when his whole network failed due to poor planning.

    Ubuntu is great but unless your a hacker or need a webserver its not practical. Large organizations need to stick with one platform and that is Microsoft as much as I wish it were not true. Until linux takes over more government agencies and foreign companies I would not trust the platform yet as its not standard.

    IF I were a CIO or an IT manager I would care only if it got the job done as thats what I am paid to do. MS exchange, active directory, and proprietary vb apps dictate my decision when lowering costs.

  • Frequent crashes? Updates? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RazvanHrestic (937048) on Wednesday August 01 2007, @02:08AM (#20067625)
    Oh come one people, this seriously cannot be the real reason he wanted to switch OS. From the TFA and the introduction in CIO Magazine about the root cause of this change I seem to gather that John was annoyed with the updates that installed themselves and antivirus updates and so on. Any of these can be turned off or set to be manually installed later, and Windows instability? Yes, when you load it up with a hole bunch of applications, some legacy, some from vendors who don't know how to properly integrate their product with the OS, you might get some instability. Resolution to this sort of problems lies in application virtualization (see SoftGrid) or Terminal Services, or Citrix, which does incur bigger support costs, but maybe not as large as supporting >=4 OSes.

    I cannot seriously see from the guy's description or even the CIO Mag's a real problem with the OS. I'd rather put this on account of his bias (also mentioned in TFA).

    Please note that this is not in any way a bash of Ubuntu, SuSE, OS X or any other OS mentioned. I agree that they are more fit to do some jobs better than others. Hell, I even run Hoary Hedgehog on my old PC (converted to a sort of media-center). It's just the arguments are dubious.

    • Re:Ubuntu? Power users? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cerelib (903469) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @03:06PM (#20062295)
      Ubuntu still contains most of the command line maintenance utilities. So if you learn how to use them, you can do remote administration. On the other hand, as long as your network latency isn't horrible, you can use the GUI tools remotely. This can be done using either VNC or X. I use X clients remotely all of the time from my Windows laptop using Xming, an X Server for Windows. Just make sure you use port forwarding in your SSH session and you are good to go.

    • Re:Ubuntu? Power users? (Score:5, Informative)

      by RAMMS+EIN (578166) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @04:03PM (#20063031) Homepage Journal
      I have a hard time imagining why you would think there could be things that could not be done remotely.

      As others have pointed out, you can do a lot of things (I would say every kind of maintenance) remotely over SSH. That basically allows you to do everything that doesn't require a graphical user interface. If you do need the graphical user interface, you're in luck, though. One of the hidden strengths of Unix [inglorion.net] is that GUI is provided by X [x.org], which can be accessed over the network. A convenient and secure way to do this is by tunenling it through SSH (try ssh -X user@host xterm, for example). Even if that isn't enough (e.g. because you're on a machine without an X server), you can even access your desktop through RFB [wikipedia.org].

      Of course, you can't perform any maintenance that requires physical access to the machine remotely. However, in all my years working with *nix systems remotely, I have never needed physical access.

    • Re:Can anyone confirm? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheRealMindChild (743925) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @03:24PM (#20062531) Homepage Journal
      I don't know about evolution specifically... hell, my little blurb is coming from a windows world, but I figure programmers are programmers and they tend to make the same mistakes.

      For example, if your firefox directory is read only, it takes MINUTES to fire up. Allow write access, it loads in a handful of seconds. Doing a little digging, it seems it is trying to open all of these config files for read/write... and when it fails, it tries a few more times. Then some of them get copied to $temp$ so that they CAN be opened for read/write, even though YOU LIKELY WON'T EVEN BE WRITING TO THEM. All it would take is a "if CantOpenConfigFileWithReadWrite(...) OpenConfigFileForReadOnly(...);"

      And I use firefox as an example, but just about every application seems to have the same issues. This may be where Evolution is at.

    • Re:Can anyone confirm? (Score:4, Informative)

      by good soldier svejk (571730) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @03:50PM (#20062879)

      6 minutes? 20 seconds? Is that true? I use Thunderbird (on Kubuntu), and it starts up in a second. I can't imagine waiting that long for an email client to load up. What is it doing that takes so long? Is this typical behavior for Evolution?

      Since this was one of his major complaints with Linux (and it's a valid one: six minutes is much too long to wait!), it seems like it's something that should be fixed ASAP if it is a widespread issue.
      It is a real issue. Evolution's Exchange connector basically does not cache anything locally. There is a setting for it, but it doesn't work. Based on Halamka's recommendation, Novell has written a caching patch for Evolution and submitted it to the upstream code tree. They also patched a bunch of other bugs he identified. So Evolution/Exchange users can thank Halamka for finally getting this fixed. I have tested these patches and they work.

    • Re:Can anyone confirm? (Score:4, Informative)

      by jc42 (318812) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @03:50PM (#20062883) Homepage Journal
      6 minutes? 20 seconds? Is that true? I use Thunderbird (on Kubuntu), and it starts up in a second. I can't imagine waiting that long for an email client to load up. What is it doing that takes so long? Is this typical behavior for Evolution?

      Well, I've experimented with Evolution off and on for some years, on various chunks of hardware, and I'd say it is typical. Whenever you tell Evolution to do something, you can go to the kitchen, make coffee, and be back with a cup before the results are on the screen. After a while, you're really wired ...

      Maybe there's some config problem that's wrong everywhere I've tried it, but I haven't seen enough clues to diagnose the problem. If anyone knows, especially if you have some fixes, you might try contacting the Evolution folks and tell them that this is a major barrier to getting their toy widely adopted.

      It's not just me, either; I've mentioned this to a number of people who've tried Evolution a few times, and they report the same molasses-like slowness.

    • Re:Not a realistic scenario (Score:5, Insightful)

      by duplicate-nickname (87112) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @03:34PM (#20062663) Homepage
      Exactly. Most IT departments are already support 2 or 3 versions of Windows on 4 or more hardware platforms. Throw in the occasional Mac for the graphic artists and support is already becoming tough. Now add in 2 more flavor of Linux (not to mention 2 or more versions of each), and you have a real nightmare.

      We're not just talking about supporting the OS, but also the business applications that would run in each of those environments. Sure more things are going web based, but 75% of what we do is still on desktop applications.

    • Re:Not a realistic scenario (Score:4, Insightful)

      by businessnerd (1009815) on Tuesday July 31 2007, @03:48PM (#20062849)
      You are correct, companies do like to standardize. However, RTFA. The conclusion addresses your concerns.

      Halamka's plans to support three different desktop operating systems may sound crazy. After all, the decision flies in the face of standardization, which seeks to decrease costs and complexity. But deploying different operating systems makes sense for the enterprise his IT group is supporting. "Hospitals and academic medical centers and universities are like the United Nations," he says. Just as you can't force all the diplomats at the UN to speak English, Halamka can't force all of his users to use the same OS. He realizes they have different computing needs and some, such as the researchers at the medical school, have their own grant money that they use to purchase whatever computers they want. The "multicultural" computing environment that CareGroup and Harvard Medical School maintain may become more common as Linux-based operating systems improve and as IT departments bump up against tech-savvy users who increasingly bring their personal devices into the workplace. Standardization may one day become a relic of the corporate IT's crusty past.
      Standardization may be good for some, but technological diversity may be better for others. Afterall, your employees should use the best tool for the job. That may be Windows or it may be Linux. Also, the more enterprises start mixing OS's, the more demand there will be for them to communicate with one another. This means a higher demand for open standards. While most of the savings of standardization is from only needing an IT staff with a knowledge of one system, another big chunk of it is from not having to make many different OS's and devices play nice together. If it became expected that your IT staff have a working knowledge of all of the most popular OS's, then standardization starts saving less and less money over a diverse IT environment.
    • By "niche" application, I'm pretty sure he's talking about legacy Windows and DOS apps that would need to be recoded to run on another OS, not common commodity applications such as your typical office suite.

      If the cost of recoding the apps is more than the cost of maintaining Windows, they're going to maintain running Windows. They'll cut back to however many Windows boxes they need to run those niche apps. Maybe a Citrix server, something like that.

      They give Apple hardware and OS X to the graphics people

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kjella (173770)
      Users are most productive on the platform they know. Users know Windows today. Training people for any other system doesn't usually pay off.

      Many companies run on cheap desktops because they have lots of people doing advanced stuff from the business' point of view, but trivial in terms of computer hardware. Apple doesn't HAVE cheap, non-multimedia basic office computers, so replacing those with Macs are expensive.

      Windows is over. Its brief and lucrative (for some) flare of popularity was a result of other p

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by GrahamCox (741991)
      Windows is over. Its brief and lucrative (for some) flare of popularity was a result of other people's crimes, other people's choices, it's time to freakin' move on.

      This is purely wishful thinking, unfortunately. I'm a Mac user by choice but at work I have to work in a mixed environment by necessity. Windows still has all the mindshare - my boss dismisses any other kind of computing as "swimming upstream" even though Windows problems cost him time and money every single day. (And as a businessman himse

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by zeromorph (1009305)

      Is there African language?

      No.

      There are a lot. It's not even one family. Really a lot! [ethnologue.com] (Every red dot a language.)

      What is probably meant: It's an African concept [wikipedia.org]. This notion is not restricted to one language/speech community and in that sense (sub-Sahara) African.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by e4g4 (533831)
        As I'm sure you are aware, the GP meant is there a language called "African", and I believe the point was that calling Ubuntu an African word is like calling "arigato" an Asian word, or "merci" a European word - I share the GP's distaste at the general tendency (particularly in America) to consider Africa as a single entity, particularly given that this tendency seems to apply *only* to Africa.

        But then, that's just how I see it.
    • "As a pc support guy in a biggish company, I'm REALLY glad this guy isn't making decisions here. Supporting Windows, OSX, SUSE and Ubuntu, and getting it all to play nice together would be a nightmare. "

      How do you figure? I didn't see any mention of Solaris in the mix, so there is no way it rises to the level of "nightmare".

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