Microsoft does Linux

DevilWAH

Microsoft has developed its own Linux. Repeat. Microsoft has developed its own Linux

Is this a big step, I am sure its not the first time Microsoft have turned to Linux in house to solve a problem. But is this Microsoft moving away from the desktop/Server OS and in to the Application and service delivery. Do they care if you are running windows on your device as long as you are using Office 365 or their enterprise services?

Fact is I want to have applications and services that work across all devices I own. I don't only want them working on a single OS or device. Is the old idea of an OS disappearing, with even Microsoft saying "no point in spending time building our own if other people have already done it for us"

Verities

Its no doubt Linux has gained massive ground as the go to server OS; almost all e-commerce servers, public facing web servers, and high performance computers are run on Linux. Its led to also helping produce many quality applications that don't have as many problems as ones designed for MS Windows. This isn't the first time MS has tried its hand in the Unix field, Google "Xenix". MS does a good job at making things easier for people and that comes at a cost which is why you see so many more problems with their products.

Businesses have been seeing the benefits of containerization for a while now and I think we're going to see more of containerization being baked into consumer products, which essentially makes them platform independent.

P.S. "No point in spending time building our own if other people have already done it for us" - sounds like something Bill Gates said when he purchased DOS from Tim Patterson.

DevilWAH

I disagree there are more problems with the windows world. In fact I have seen a lot of issues with Linux because to deploy successfully a service on Linux you need a skilled engineer. I see so many Linux deployments that some one has deployed by following a step through guide and ended up the a system that ""kind of does what they planned but is a mishmash of 101 guides of google and its clear the engineer has no idea what they are really doing of the structure of Lnux.

Take email for example to set up an email server with the functionally of Microsoft exchange takes a far more skilled engineer to produce the same result. Now if you have a really skilled Linux engineer they can create far more bespoke unique solutions that windows. But for small IT groups that might have to support 50-100 solutions with a staff of 3 or 4 people Windows can provide a far more stable and in-depth solution portfolio than trying to do the same in Linux.

Its very much 6 of one and half a dozen of the other. for a user group of 400 we deliver over 200 unique solution on about 180 servers with a small team. And we have a few good Linux engineers but with out the microsoft platform to soak up the standardized tried and tested solution we would struggle to support what we do.

and having worked with and for some of the largest companies in the world I can assure you that plenty of them still run a majority of windows systems for there public facing servers. I think the only place that you see Linux as the exclusive OS is in the HPC world, and most of them are a world away from the "Linux" most of us would think of. Having worked with a few HPC solutions as soon as you start to get serious there are no Linux distributions to take of a shelf, you build your own from scratch.

Liux vs windows make me think a bit of [FONT=arial, sans-serif]Burt Munro, [/FONT]

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]Windows is the guy who goes to the a shop and buys a 600cc super bike that does 160mph out of the box, it has traction control, EMU and all the latest tec, its great but you cant easily customize it with out speclised tools and are really locked in to what you get.

Burt on the other hand gets him self a [/FONT]1920 Indian Scout 600cc able to do 55mph, with simple tool in his shed he rebuilds it to do over 200mph, its cheap to buy, easy to make changes to, but takes a great deal of skill and understanding to really get the best out of it.

Good IT managers dont see Linux as better than windows or windows better than Linux. they are both brilliant considering the complexity of what they are, and what ether can do "with out issues" in the right hands.

paul78

Interesting article but not really surprising based on the application being described.

newinew54

I thought that I was reading wrong when I sow the name of the tread.. very interesting article thank you!

discount81

I agree with this sentiment.

Currently working in a VFX studio which is a HPC environment, 95% of our desktops are Linux simply because most of the software in VFX either needs Linux or runs better on it.
Most of our servers are Solaris, Linux or FreeBSD.
We still use Active Directory, and it can be quite painful sometimes integrating everything.
Especially over a WAN, windows can tune TCP buffers/send/wait etc on the fly, Linux/BSD etc needs fine tuning to have it work properly over a WAN.


We have a team of about 15 IT staff, for 300 users and it is still a struggle to cope with the demand.

My last job had over 5000 users, in a 99% Windows environment, with the odd Linux server around the place.
We had 8 IT staff and aside from the usual hiccups there was far less issues.

Linux is great, and it can be set and forget in some situations, for example my web servers I do the usual maintenance, updates and monitoring.
But using it as a wide scale solution in a business, for desktops, servers etc, you need skilled engineers on staff who know it inside out.
Windows still needs skilled admins, but in my experience you can find people with a couple years experience who can run it functionally.