A CIO's View of Ubuntu 308
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."
Print view (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cio.com/article/print/41140 [cio.com] is much nicer to read.
CIO.com doesn't want us to read the article (Score:3, Informative)
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:KDE vs GNOME (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Having your cake and eating it too ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:KDE vs GNOME (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A genius! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can anyone confirm? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Can anyone confirm? (Score:4, Informative)
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:African language? (Score:3, Informative)
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:Ubuntu? Power users? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Mac's in research (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:Well known? (Score:1, Informative)
Heh, I knew instantly who he was, but then, I work at Harvard Medical School, which he is CIO of!
Re:Arrrgh my eyes.. my eyes (Score:2, Informative)
Close but Limited (Score:5, Informative)
Now that I gone over some of my pet-peeves I want to cover some of my opinion of what makes Linux great.
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.
Re:A genius! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:CIO.com doesn't want us to read the article (Score:3, Informative)
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