how many of you are switching gears on Linux Desktop?
 

I use Linux at home and work. I really tried hard to push Linux as a desktop to clients. I know this will sound like a negative post. I'm giving up on this battle. I really despise managing Windows for all the headaches, weight, security issues, and other nightmares come from Microsoft. Linux truly is a IT guy friendly OS, but users see it otherwise. Is Linux on the Desktop a losing battle in the Enterprise? Many companies accepted Linux as web servers, proxy, firewall, NAS, and backup servers. Due to poor Windows Desktop integration for OpenLDAP, it became a difficult solution as an authentication server to manage the Windows Desktop environment. Many years of effort, but I really don't see the light. What are your realistic thoughts? Is this a lost hope? I would always use Linux at home. I'm so sick of Microsoft dictating and dominating my IT life. Since there aren't many job openings for 100% Linux shops, I'm slowly losing my interest towards this push. Have some of you been very successful? This post isn't a specific trouble shooting post. I want to know your thoughts and opinions. Thanks again.

Oh the subject that never ends :) is like those "is this the year of linux?" news articles

One thing that you mention is about IT people and clients, quiet honest, linux desktop can be loved by every IT guy out there but client people isn't interested in troubleshooting desktop problems nor they're interested in spent time learning new things. A lot of people grew in a windows world, they used windows, they get used to windows way to do things, they get used to how windows desktop looks and to this day, most of those people (normally, client people) want to work still with windows

I think that beyond all things good or bad about different operating systems, you could always try to evangelize but not to force, and regarding "clients", clients are always right (not always of course but people like to say that ;)), what they want is what IT people should give them

The best one can do is present a product, efficiencies and disadvantages and let the rest to decide, I love linux but I was never forced to use it, a friend just told me "hey, you should try linux", so I did, it wasn't easy but I liked the challenge of learning something new, so I started to love it. However, not everyone likes that kind of challenges, if someone doesn't want to use it despite whatever you told about linux, then, let then be happy, in linux and opensource in general is always mentioned that you should have freedom to choose, then, in the same way, people should have freedom to use whatever it suites them better be it windows, mac, linux, solaris, whatever...

Is desktop linux a lost battle? it may loose or gain market share? To be honest, who cares?, I think such discussions are overrated and have received too much media attention, people who likes linux will still be using it, maybe some people will turn to linux and some people might as well be done with linux and go back to other systems, those things happens and there's no point in trying to analyze it.

Here is a thing. Windows Desktop is incredibly frustrating to manage. Ms Policy kits, software installations, hardware migrations, virus outbreaks, Exchange server uptime, and all the crap come with Windows, it is just a nightmare. Only thing that goes through my mind is "if everything was Linux, I wouldn't be in this situation." Dealing with Windows want to make people quit the entire IT field. Everything MS claims it should work, never works. You can't even predict their fall apart rate. I am always shocked how Ms dominated the entire industry with crappie products.

There's the ideal world and there's the real world.

As far as windows management concerns, surely it can be frustrating, but, its part of the job nevertheless, as I said, you can evangelize, but not much beyond that, even if MS decide to change how all their products works, it won't happen from one day to another so you will still have to deal with the crappy way of work of installed products until new ones come along

Why don't I have the right to complain? If MS was free. I would be a fool to complain. Most companies paid a good chunk of MSTAX and the upper management doesn't have a clue what is going on in the field. Ms servers are only server OS in the history that will crash because you switch the PCI slot for the mass storage controller. Did the early 90s Netware did this? This is year 2009. How come they can't fix all the crap after billions given to Microsoft? I think Microsoft needs to be investigated and broken up to bunch of small pieces. Also, I wish Bill Gates the crook foundation fail and cause a wreck to this world.

Of course you can complain if you want, I just did my opinion about what you ask ;)

As you can clearly see. My anger towards Microsoft has became abnormal. I don't know why it is so hard to fix their issues in Windows OSes. Linux is fixing their own problems with probably the 1/10000 of Microsoft costs. Sometimes, I wonder if the world has gone completely insane and constantly support Microsoft, because Microsoft has became the same thing like Heroine or Crack Cocaine for them.

A friend of mine had her system go down just under 2 weeks ago. It is Vista, and apparently was taken over by malware. She pays a service to support her, and they did - removing malware and rendering her system unbootable.

She couldn't even get into the recovery partition until I turned up (I was out of town). It took me nearly a day to get her system booting; I had to find a Windows repair disk on the web since none came with her system and the recovery partition would only reload the system partition and wipe out the data partition. Turns out her MBR was hosed; I think she may have had a bootblock virus but I am not sure since I wasn't in at the beginning of the debacle. It took me that long to track down the tools I needed just to write a Vista MBR, searching on the web.

Then had to reload her system; things were just torn all to hell there.

Since then, she has been reloading packages and trying to restore data from backups. She did indeed have data backups, and she thought they were complete and correct. Turns out they were NOT complete and correct; she seems to have lost a lot of email, and she gets some song and dance that the backup software can't backup Outlook email.

She has spent MANY hours getting data back on the system, and the loss of the email data is a disaster for her (this is a business system).

While I have been helping her with this, I have also been educating her on proper procedures to safeguard a system and ensure that it is recoverable regardless of what happens. I also have imaged her basic system, using a Knoppix CD. Why Knoppix? Because of the problems imaging Windows from Windows...you just can't access any open files.

She is now roaming around grumbling about how hard Windows makes it, and bemoaning the loss of her emails - when she thought all that was safe since she did in fact have a backup plan in place using commercial software (from Maxtor, provided with a USB hard drive).

This is nearly two weeks now, and she is *almost* back up, but after many many hours of work by both her, me, and her support organization (working remotely).

I commented that on my Linux system I could have recovered an MBR - literally - within 10 minutes. I commented that backups with Linux are easy. I commented that emails are easy to back up. I discussed how Linux lets you access open files, and how easy that makes things.

I have shown her my system, and talked a bit about learning curves and how different Linux is from Windows, and how I couldn't imagine having to spend two weeks recovering a linux system, though I have many times spent that much time recovering Windows.

She is going to try it. Dual boot at first and if she survives the culture shock, we'll deploy Vista in a virtual machine eventually. But this nightmare and the consequent data loss has convinced her that she has to move.

It is a shame that it takes something like this, but it does.

That is a great suggestion for home users. In the corporate environment, when things go wrong, they are going to blame on their IT department. When they get BSOD, they assume it is caused by their IT. Why would they blame it on MS? They just gave them close to a million dollars on licenses. The wonderful life of IT. If I had a choice, I would have gone with the accounting.

Here, a story to think about.

I never had an MS/DOS machine at work, until Windows became a "standard", mainly for lack of decently priced competitors, Concurrent DOS and DESQviewX were clearly superior, but nobody really bought them for serious projects around the environment I was in, nor bothered to ask what we could have wanted.

Anyways, one day I found out that the geniuses in the engineering area, had appropriated a zillion of DOS machines with Windows 3.0 to build a distributed architecture using the Honeywell servers and LAN Manager network. That's when my battle with viruses started.

Never seen a virus before. Not in VMS, not in GCOS, not in CP/M, not in Xenix, not on Mac OS, so I assume, unless anybody can prove me wrong, viruses officially were introduced to computing with the advent of Microsoft introduced "features".

The introduction of the problem created two new working positions in my branch, and an entire new office at general services, just to support the PCs (I can't resist not to laugh when somebody talks of windows TCO, I had a GCOS machine with years of uptime, all it did in NINE years was crashing one single LARK disk, and the VAX did not even have a single failure in the same time period, I did not check the uptime but I'm quite sure it was the same).

At this times, the Windows machines troubles, in addition to the other folks mentioned, took half my time, and some unaccountable time from the users trying to fix their system before finally giving up and calling from help, admitting of having been 'bugged' somehow. For whatever reason, my Xenix box was not having any issues either, nor it was the OS/2 server, nor the VAX, nor the GCOS systems, not the Mac's, all on the same network, just DOS and Windows.

Next, I left for a new life and now I had to pay for my own software (sigh). I found some work with this software company, and they had a few VAX, a few Alpha, and a few PCs, we ran Tru64, SCO, VMS and NT. The miracle discovery was that there were no viruses running on the Alpha NT, so in a minute of hope I thought that finally windows x86 and PCs were going to be in a giant future trash can, and Alpha would have became the paradise of Windows computing.

In the mean time, I was running Windows at home, and at the business, struggling with the viruses, and hoping that the new emerging Linux would catch up to be usable as SCO. The main issue was recompiling the kernel, on a 386 sometimes it would take all night. At one point I even had one of the first Slackware and Debian running, with dial-in over the phone, so I could provide a cheap x86 stations running a free OS.

Microsoft in the mean time cancelled the Alpha version, obviously when you have something that works and with no viruses, why keep it, it would look bad if you are in the virus distribution servers market (I do not claim the right for this one).

For about seven years after, I was out of the computing business, and during this time my systems were dual boot until the advent of XP. With the first 2.8GHZ I started running only Fedora and Suse, with Windows 2000 in the Win4lin VM.

With XP I decided I was done with MS. I bought one for my kid, that's it. I still run the 2k versions, only inside virtual machines, most of the times with the network disconnected, and just to run legacy applications until they are ready for the garbage.

I may have to buy one more XP64 maybe, but I hope by the time this XP64 will be good to trash, there may be no more need of Windows and MS for the things I do.

Now I run Debian GNU for multimedia, and develop on Oracle on Fedora, Suse and Solaris. I could use Designer in the Windows VM if I have to, but I generally use XE on the Fedora installs. I found peace, no more viruses, no more wasted time, so hopefully as there were no viruses before Microsoft, the hope remains that there will be none left after Microsoft.

In the last three years we had only one system failure due to some software issue I could not track (lost a set of LVM volumes, but I had a good backup). I have not since used LVM, and the only problems we had were some, inevitable, hardware failures (most of our machines are quite old).

After 30+ years dealing with computers, linux is my current choice. Is not as solid as GCOS and VMS but is as solid as any other Unix.

I don't know, really. is a mistery of how all this folks don't want anything else than M$, it raises definitivelly the suspicion of some hidden agenda.

Thanks dibi58. I know what you mean. Linux is a solid UNIX system.
By the way, how many of you are mostly working in a Linux shop? Is it totally impossible to escape from Microsoft? I'm starting to be allergic to Windows.

The first virus I ever saw was on a Mac-II, along about 1987 or so. I had heard of them before that but had never encountered one.

This predates Win-3.

There were viruses for DOS long before 1987.

I believe the first wild spread DOS virus was called, brain in 1986. Apple had a virus before DOS. I believe it was around 1981 and it was called, cloner. It had a virus like a behavior, but it did no damages like DOS did.

You can also back date virus till 1970s in certain mainframes. Most OSes didn't started off with various user privileges like UNIX did.
We all know which company platform had most so far due to the poor OS design. However, they got popular, because they knew their users will cry and yell, "I KNOW NOTHING! I KNOW NOTHING! SOMEONE FIX THIS NOW! I don't want to know! I don't want to know! HELP!"