

A Return to Linux on the Workstation - Danieru
http://cuddletech.com/blog/?p=770

======
gunmetal
Even a Joyent tech admits Ubuntu is a more pleasant experience. Thought this
was interesting, but all his points are not isolated to the desktop
experience. Pretty much all the reasons he switched to linux affect the
building and maintenance of servers too. I think it just boils down to
community support.

~~~
pjmlp
I will read the article later, when I have more time, but many geeks that only
know Linux and eventually BSD, have no idea how painful commercial UNIX
systems can be.

Several of our customers have HP-UX systems that look like plain System V
systems straight out of the 70's.

~~~
dredmorbius
That was my first response to Linux when I was first trying it out. Back in
the mid 1990s.

At the userland level especially, it didn't suck, and (with the GNU userland,
windowmanagers, etc.), in fact, sucked radically less than stock commercial
Unices I'd been using at the time (Sun, HP, AT&T, Data General, BSD).

The situation's only gotten much, much better.

I'll occasionally find myself in situations where I'm connecting to commercial
Unix boxes (was a semi-recent shop where a fair number of staff still ran CDE
desktops), and, really, it's painful. Doable, but painful.

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donniezazen
After using Archlinux for a year I am back on Ubuntu 12.10. Ubuntu 12.10 is an
absolute bliss. It is a complete hassle free desktop environment. If Ubuntu
had support of hardware and software developers, it is definitely ready for
some serious competition.

On the other hand, I am not so happy with Linux kernel which is being updated
every 3 months yet it performs terribly when it comes to power management.
There is a new power regression bug every few months.

~~~
antihero
Weird, I'm on Arch and it's no more hassle than Ubuntu. Do you use a custom
WM/etc?

~~~
donniezazen
I have tried several WM from DWM, Awesome to XFCE4 and Gnome. There are things
that Archlinux community doesn't want to do as a part of their philosophy. I
am not saying it is wrong. I just like already set up distribution for now.

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sgrove
Ahem, on the _desktop_. And the switch was from OSX.

I don't much care either way - I use OSX on my workstations and Ubuntu on my
servers - but the title seems overhyped for such a simple article.

~~~
brutuscat
But at the end I didn't understand because he wrote "In the end, 3 days later
I had been issued a replacement MacBook Pro which I got just as Mountain Lion
released." So he went back right?

~~~
gonzo
Right. He, like most of the tech world, is using a Mac on his desktop.

~~~
darkstalker
Proof of that?

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FranProgrammer
I have installed Ubuntu Linux 4+ years ago, basically when its multimedia
capabilities started to work in a fresh installation. I have never felt any
necessity to come back to OS X/Windows since then.

~~~
hevical
Once Steam comes to Linux, I don't see many reasons why a lot of gamers won't
switch over. Many of the people I who use Windows to develop in
Python/Ruby/etc use either a VM or SSH into a Linux box, simply because they
want to game. I think many people will not want to pay the Microsoft tax,
especially for Windows 8.

~~~
nvmc
The only games that will be on GNU/Linux, at least at first are Valve games
and crappy indie flash games. While it's the first step, most developers
aren't on board. Yet.

~~~
Maakuth
Most of the Humble Indie Bundle games seem to be available on Linux and I
wouldn't call them crappy nor flash. But yeah, the big titles rarely work.
Valve's work on porting their Source engine to Linux will certainly help this.

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rdl
SmartOS looks pretty interesting (the thing he works on as mentioned in TFA).
Do people have opinions about it?

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jnsaff2
Headline is a cheap clickbait.

~~~
threedaymonk
You appear to assume that obtaining clicks from HN readers through subterfuge
is the author's goal.

I don't think that's borne out by the content of that post or of other posts.
It's more likely that he's just writing for his regular audience, for whom the
title expresses exactly what's happened: he's changed the operating system on
"the Workstation" to Linux.

~~~
Danieru
I should apologize, I submitted the article with a different headline: "Joyent
sysadmin switches to linux". I contemplated using Ben's full name but I
thought better of assuming everyone knew who he was. My title was an attempt
to summarize the article, which I will avoid doing in the future.

For those who do not follow his blog, Ben was a major OpenSolaris proponent
and even served on the council before the Oracle buy out. I never thought I'd
see the day he replaced a solaris machine with linux.

Now I should also mention that Ben thought Sun got distracted by focusing on
OpenSolaris as a OS for developer workstations. Thus I think it would be
inaccurate to call the OpenSolaris forks dead, I'm sure he still prefers
Solaris on servers.

~~~
wmf
I actually prefer your headline because I think it gives context to the post.
Joyent has been promoting Solaris in a world where _everyone_ else appears to
be using Linux.

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derleth
So... what's a 'workstation' these days? Every desktop machine has the 3M: (at
least) a megapixel display, (at least) a megabyte of RAM, and (at least) a 1
MIPS processor, and that's in addition to little things like graphics cards
and Ethernet (and/or WiFi) hardware, both of which were defining features at
one point.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer>

Does the definition of workstation come down to what the computer's used for
at this point?

~~~
DeepDuh
I'm torn apart whether this is a good or a silly question. On one hand it's an
interesting nitpick on the change of labels / language, on the other hand it
feels like Gordon E. Moore should poke you a bit with a stick or something.

In other words: Labels change, especially in IT. Duh?

~~~
derleth
That doesn't answer my question, which is: What has the label changed _to_?

~~~
DeepDuh
I'd look at it like this: A workstation is what you use when computation power
and/or memory bandwidth is a limiting factor of your work. This holds true
for:

\- developers of software with long compilation time

\- 3d animators / professional video editors

\- scientists that want to run simulations

\- engineers that want to run simulations

For these people, a computer is never fast enough and they get a tangible
benefit for every speedup - which is why they always have the best performing
gear. And the (multicore) performance of the best gear is always
[CONSUMERGRADE_PC * X].

I'd set X=3 and then you have yourself a workstation. (For example 16 core
Xeon vs. 4 core i5.

For that reason I don't think it really makes sense to define workstation in
an absolute number of Gigaflops/Hertz/Byte. It's just the cutting edge of
desktop computing that's still feasible for work (e.g. overclocked CPUs to
8Ghz with liquid nitrogen cooling don't count, neither do machines with say
more than 2kW heat - that's when you need a computing cluster).

