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."

Well known?

[Nick of NSTime]

I've never heard of him.

almost everything is "niche business application"

[boguslinks]

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.

Re:Well known?

[Nick of NSTime]

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

Re:Well known?

[ak3ldama]

And you sir, are the metric by which all peoples popularity is measured.

Re:That's what I was wondering.

[boguslinks]

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?

I don't know what Halamka's approach is... but I know exactly what the approach of the PHBs will be - continue to buy and use Windows.

Re:heh

[good soldier svejk]

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.

This is not a job for a CIO

[crevistontj]

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. He is too far removed from the support folks to make a decision based in reality. CIOs should not be spending their time testing and selecting OSes. If that's what he's interested in, he's in the wrong line of work.

Re:Not a realistic scenario

[duplicate-nickname]

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:Skip Windows

[Junior J. Junior III]

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 because that's who'll benefit from them most, not because no one else can use them. Any secretary might work fine in Office on Mac, but if she could just as well use Linux or has to use Windows because of some niche app, there's no reason to spend the extra $$$ on Apple solutions. Apple's expensive. Maybe less so than MS given the management overhead and security headaches. But up front it looks more expensive because you have to buy premium grade hardware, not barely sufficient low-end hardware, and for your grunt-level workforce that seems wasteful.

They give Linux to everyone else, because everyone else can work with Linux apps just fine. It'll run on anything, no vendor will bully you, and it's Free.

Re:That's what I was wondering.

[gujo-odori]

For the Mac users, of course there are four options: Mac Office, Windows Office via Parallels or VMWare Fusion, standard OpenOffice.Org, and NeoOffice (native Mac port of OpenOffice.Org). I use the latter and have zero problems exchanging files with MS Office users.

I work at a very large IT company whose name is a household word (not Microsoft, but I used to work there, too), and we have a heterogeneous environment: Windows machines make up the majority of the network, our mail is on Exchange, and there are a lot of Mac, Linux, and BSD machines, especially among the engineering departments. I also have Mac Office, but never use it anymore; I find I prefer OOo. I use Entourage for Email,and while it has a few quirks and is not a native Exchange client, I find that in most respects I actually prefer it to Outlook; going back to using Outlook after learning Entourage would really suck. In fact, I prefer it in all respects.

Of course, what they *could* do about MS Office is chuck it completely. Keep Windows where it makes sense, but move away from Microsoft applications. The cost savings would be huge. Or, they could not to it but start planning it, and could probably extract large price concessions from Microsoft if they scrap the plan. The cost savings would still be huge.

Re:Skip Windows

[Kjella]

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 people's crimes, other people's choices, it's time to freakin' move on.

...wishful thinking alert. If you could kill the trinity of Internet Explorer, Office and Outlook/Exchange then maybe. Firefox and OO.o is making progress but they're not exactly dazzling the market.

Re:Not a realistic scenario

[businessnerd]

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.

Re:A genius!

[AeroIllini]

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 diff patches to rebuild their wireless drivers. Regular people need GUIs, and hand-holding scripts. Power users want bash scripting and piping. Different tasks, different tools. We can't neglect either.

Re:African language?

[e4g4]

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.

Re:Skip Windows

[GrahamCox]

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 himself trying to compete in an open market I always find the "swimming upstream" comment odd - but there you go.)

Windows will be over one day though, that much is definite. So will Mac OS, Linux, etc - when it will happen I don't know but can you seriously imagine that platform wars will persist for another 100 years? 50, 25? They will go the way of AC versus DC, Morse versus, well, whatever Morse competed with - telephones perhaps. Gradually the OS will just fade away into the background where it belongs and all the data types that people use will be standardised. Roll on!

I was expecting him to pick all Windows

[Billly Gates]

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.