A CIO's View of Ubuntu

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."

A genius!

[niceone]

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...

Re:Well known?

[jimbug]

Results 1 - 10 of about 142,000,000 for jesus [google.com] Not as famous as Jesus!

Re:Well known?

[veganboyjosh]

Results 1 - 10 of about 28,400,000 for tom + myspace [google.com]

Nor Tom, from Myspace.

Where I stopped reading

[textstring]

"The only other problem Halamka ran into was with MIDI music".
I can not take this man seriously anymore.

Re:Well known?

[XxtraLarGe]

Did you know who he was before you read the article or Googled him?

As a matter of fact, yes. I recognized his name from this article [slashdot.org].

Re:Well known?

[pintpusher]

none of them are as famous as me [google.com]: Results 1 - 10 of about 2,230,000,000 for me. (0.09 seconds)

*rimshot*

You're right!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is as famous as you! [google.com] Results 1 - 10 of about 3,090,000,000 for you. (0.05 seconds)

Even Time Magazine confirms it! [time.com]

Re:Well known?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... I think I will try some random names in Google...

Results 1 - 10 of about 4,630,000 for Jacob Smith [google.com]

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,460,000 for Cheryl Johnson [google.com]

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,290,000 for Samuel Travolta [google.com]

Results 1 - 10 of about 519,000 for Susan Hannover [google.com]

Results 1 - 10 of about 34,400 for bathilda bagshot [google.com]

Results 1 - 10 of about 203,000 for east australian orange ringed octopus [google.com]

By your logic, "John Halamka" must be more obscure that the "East Australian orange-ringed octopus", but more well known than "Bathilda Bagshot."

Re:This is not a job for a CIO

[fishbowl]

"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".

Re:Well known?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you beat me http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=you &btnG=Google+Search [google.com]