Open source isn't worth the hassle

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Doug G
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Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by Doug G »

Well, tonight afer years of dealing with the frustrations of linux an open source, the lack of documentation and the <span style='color:blue' title='I'm naughty, are you naughty?'>smurf</span>-poor attitude of most linuxheads, I'm back to a working OS which happens to be windows.

It's just not worth the hassle to put up with the substandard documentation about the marginally usable software that comes out of open source.
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by josh »

what kind of problems were you facing the documentation didnt cover?
alex.barylski
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by alex.barylski »

I feel your pain but I don't nessecarily agree, 100%

Linux is waaaay nicer to work than Windows when you administer a web server. As a desktop OS, Ubuntu is pretty straight forward but Windows just does it better. :)
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Eran
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by Eran »

I'm pretty sure that if you tried to setup a windows server at the level you would like a linux server to operate (ie, permissions, resources, virtualization and so forth) you would find out that the technical expertise needed is just as high. No manual or documentation is going to make you an expert or server administration.

The fact of the matter is that in a lot of cases open-source is easier to modify and customize if you have sufficient knowledge and expertise. Closed-source can be touched through what you know through the manual. Other than that, you need to start paying for customization and additions - you lose flexibility and incur larger expenses.
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Christopher
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by Christopher »

Doug G wrote:Well, tonight afer years of dealing with the frustrations of linux an open source, the lack of documentation and the <span style='color:blue' title='I'm naughty, are you naughty?'>smurf</span>-poor attitude of most linuxheads, I'm back to a working OS which happens to be windows.

It's just not worth the hassle to put up with the substandard documentation about the marginally usable software that comes out of open source.
Interestingly non-specific. Looking back over Doug G's posts he appears to have extensive Windows experience. And he has apparently been using Fedora -- not a distro with support. I am not a Fedora fan either. I always found it a PITA. RedHat is better, especially on servers. I still prefer Debian servers and Ubuntu desktops.
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Benjamin
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by Benjamin »

I've found recent versions of Fedora have been full of bugs.
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volomike
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by volomike »

I'm with you guys on the Ubuntu desktops and the Debian (or Ubuntu) servers. It's got an ease of use; has more stable, newer packages; it's hardened; it's got a lot of developers working on it and improving it; Canonical is pumping a good bit of cash into it along with other big companies; and has an outstanding community that doesn't mind helping newbies.

Fedora seemed to have old packages and an unstable nature to it. It's no fun when you're browsing, you play a video, and Firefox crashes.

CentOS seemed to have old packages and not a large enough community of supporters.

RHEL was nice and stable but the packages were too old.
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volomike
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by volomike »

Also, as far as PHP goes, I found that Windows and Mac are like after-thoughts. Linux is the platform where most components are developed. Linux gives you a lot of raw power with less API hassle, in my opinion. Plus, at command-line, I can get so much more done -- especially when interacting with remote hosts.

Is there a learning curve? You bet. I needed a good mentor with Linux and found one out of Brazil. He and I worked together doing sysop tasks for a few years before I went out on my own as a PHP freelancer. However, at least with Ubuntu, you have an outstanding and helpful support community, and some inexpensive paid options through Canonical.com as well.

And for my money, Apache is the place to be, not IIS on Windows. Once you see the API chart for Apache, you see how well-designed it is and how it has less API goo, but is just as robust as IIS.

The other bad thing about Windows is the camel's nose under the tent problem. I mean, you bring in Microsoft Consulting to give you advice, and they often tell you that you need 18 servers for a robust web app solution:

- primary and secondary active directory servers
- 2 other servers for the active directory as your failover, making a cluster of 4 servers in total
- primary database server and its replication slave for failover
- primary and secondary DNS servers
- 2 other servers for the failover
- primary and secondary WINS servers
- 2 other servers for the failover
- primary and secondary IIS web servers
- 2 other servers for the failover
----
That's a total of 18 servers! If you had a heavy load on Linux, you could probably handle all of the above on like 3 Linux servers to start with, perhaps growing to 6 or 8 over time. But not 18.
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Eran
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by Eran »

CentOS seemed to have old packages and not a large enough community of supporters.
I'm biased, but CentOS has a very strong community of supporters. It's also very stable.
You are also not locked in to the packages provided, which is the beauty of linux systems. Just plug in to one of the many repositories and update to the most current software you need.
Cirdan
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by Cirdan »

While I like the idea of open source and being able to do everything the way you want it....the lack of standards and uniformity is really annoying and is one of the (arguably) biggest problems that is preventing *nix from growing to any popularity in the OS market.
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JAB Creations
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by JAB Creations »

Doug, Linux is not (yet) really a production platform though I'd really like to see it become one. Windows (and by that I mean only Windows XP) is great as a production environment.

However as far as server environments are concerned you just can't beat Linux, now, tomorrow, and I'm sure long before I even touched HTML.

You only have my sympathy as far as trying to make Linux work as a production environment...and I have to add...there are plenty of distros out there so naturally one distro may work nicely for you, some might not really do much...and others may downright alienate you. It's really subjective.

I know Ubuntu is the AOL of Linux distros (as I've heard before) though I recommend trying that distro as it seems on track with keeping the need to mess around in the console to a minimal. I know most people dislike my shunning the console but good design is about minimizing controls to increase production, not maximizing control while decreasing the speed of execution (and by that I mean typing commands in to a console when I can paste some text and hit a button to achieve the desired results in a tenth of the time). Manually controlling things has to be minimized to increase productivity and I think that's what you're trying to do?

The unfortunate part is that I've read a lot about Microsoft patent trolling (such as FAT/NTFS) and how the Linux community has had to do things to work around those patents (e.g. reverse engineering DLL's to make Windows programs work in Linux) so with Microsoft's monopoly it's understandable that the Linux community has to deal with many more issues simply because of Microsoft then if they weren't burdened by those issues.

However Linux has really come a long ways the past few years since when I first tried using it. I guess each person has their given tolerance of how much they are willing to break out of familiarity to get work done...and yeah there are plenty of programs that I couldn't break from that I use every day (e.g. Advanced Find and Replace) that simply can't be replaced by console commands (e.g. grep) because I'm much more interested in maximizing output then saying, 'Hey, I'm all for this or that!'

I recommend instead of simply ranting about Linux in general due to your specific experiences that weren't shared here in the thread that you spend time writing about the specific tasks you need to achieve regardless of the OS you use. Most experienced people here are using a Linux distro so someone may be able to say, 'Oh yeah that's actually a snap in the distro I use...'.

Keep in mind that Linux isn't just based around the products and people you've specifically interacted with...and yes Linux in general has it's share of flaws like anything but if you communicate clearly about what you're trying to achieve you're much more likely to have your cake and eat it too. :wink:

...oh and if anyone knows of a GUI program in Linux that's like grep but is much faster to interactive with and use like Advanced Find and Replace that would greatly increase Linux as a viable production environment for me. :wink:
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Benjamin
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by Benjamin »

JAB Creations wrote:Linux is not (yet) really a production platform
JAB you can't say things like this and still maintain any credibility.
  • The Linux kernel and other core OS components -- including libraries, device drivers, file systems, networking, IPC, and memory management -- operated consistently and completed all the expected durations of runs with zero critical system failures.
  • Every run generated a high success rate (over 95%), with a very small number of expected intermittent failures that were the result of the concurrent executions of tests that are designed to overload resources.
  • Linux system performance was not degraded during the long duration of the run.
  • The Linux kernel properly scaled to use hardware resources (CPU, memory, disk) on SMP systems.
  • The Linux system handled continuous full CPU load (over 99%) and high memory stress well.
  • The Linux system handled overloaded circumstances correctly.
See: Putting Linux reliability to the test
josh
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by josh »

Cirdan wrote:While I like the idea of open source and being able to do everything the way you want it....the lack of standards and uniformity is really annoying and is one of the (arguably) biggest problems that is preventing *nix from growing to any popularity in the OS market.
Heard of IE??
Doug G
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by Doug G »

To clarify, I've been using linux off and on since I bought (yes, bought) Red Hat Linux 4. In those days linux appeard to have a bright future, mostly because money was flowing. Anyone remember VALinux? ( http://www.networkworld.com/news/1999/1210linux.html ).

However, since the dot-com bubble popped, the financing for nearly all ongoing development dried up. Red Hat once was a darling of wall street but no longer. There have been ongoing patent scares shaking up the stability of linux in the corporate world. But to me the biggest problems in open source world are:

* First and foremost, the scattered and often incoherent documentation. Some products have excellent documentation and for others documentation can be virtually nonexistent
* Lack of hardware support
* The attitude of many open source advocates in usenet and forums.
* No common application installer across linux distributions.
* Lack of system administration tools a la Active Directory and GPO's. Perhaps something like RedHat Directory will someday plug that gap but it doesn't look promising yet.
* Uncertainty about the future of any given open source product. ex: Lead developer quits, project development just stops, cya later users.

Unfortunately the lack of a viable economic model for open source will keep it from ever being much more than a curiosity to most prudent large corporate environments, and the hardware and desktop frustrations on many systems, particularly laptops, will keep linux from making a major penetration in the desktop market for quite a while yet. Progress is being made but without financing for major development open source will remain a bit player.

$000000000000000.02
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Eran
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Re: Open source isn't worth the hassle

Post by Eran »

First and foremost, the scattered and often incoherent documentation. Some products have excellent documentation and for others documentation can be virtually nonexistent
So windows software have all amazing documentation? that's obviously not true. The quality of documentation varies greatly between software products, regardless of OS.
The attitude of many open source advocates in usenet and forums.
Again, people are people, regardless of which OS they use. If you think everybody on the MS forums and usenet groups are extremely nice and helpful, I have news for you. They're still regular people.

In short, all of your points apply to any software product, regardless of the OS it runs on (most support both windows and Linux, so it's really a irrelevant).

I'm just guessing, but I think you had one specifically bad encounter with some support forum guys and you're still fuming from it. Let it go, it'll blow over and you'll forget all about it.
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