
Ask HN: If WinServer2019 was made free to use tomorrow,would you start using it - ThinkBeat
If Microsoft decided to make using Windows Server 2019 (all edition) free to use tomorrow, would you start using it?  And if so how?<p>Would you be more likely to adopt it if Microsoft open-sourced it? (I know very little chance of that)<p>In either case Microsoft could make money on support, and consulting services.<p>I think more competition on the server side, than various flavours of Linux and some flavours of UNIX would be  healthy.<p>For a time I worked in Windows only enterprises and I had little to do with administering any of the servers, but code got deployed to them and I never had any issues with the parts of the server I used.<p>I would think that there are some workloads and tasks that might make more sense to run on a Windows Server vs a Linux one but I am not sure what (aside from legacy Windows only applications)
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achn
Microsoft made their consumer OS basically “free” and in doing so loaded it
with so much telemetry, data collection, bloatware, and dark patterns, that it
is unusable without significant and ongoing intervention.

So, no, I would not want them to have to find alternative income streams from
their server OS.

~~~
jasonv
Are all of these things included in the versions of Windows they make
available on Azure..? I wondered that, but wasn't going to make an account
just to find out.

My kid wants a laptop for gaming... he's been using my MacBook Air for KSP and
Minecraft for a long time, and I won't be buying a new machine until the new
models are out and proven... so I've conceded to getting him a gaming laptop
for the time being.

It'll be Windows. It'll probably be our only Windows machine for the
foreseeable future, but I know we'll have to de-clutter it when it gets here.
And I still need to research that.

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llarsson
Is there a HN approved way of doing this?

I recall there being various solutions that cleaned older versions of Windows,
but perhaps did so a bit too aggressively (disabling services left and right
in the XP era), so experts recommended against using them. I have no idea
about the current state of affairs, but may find myself in the same boat soon
and need to know.

~~~
krapp
> Is there a HN approved way of doing this?

Yes. Not using Windows to begin with.

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emeraldd
Simple answer, No. Microsofts overall approach to licensing is complex enough
that you have to be an expert in their license to even have an inkling of an
idea what is permissible and what isn't. The OS layer is just the tip of the
iceberg. It's not immediately useful in and of itself without things like SQL
server, IIS/Asp or whatever their web app layer is these days, etc. The would
have to shift gears on pretty much every technology to make it worthwhile for
a Linux/*nix stack developer to look in their direction.

~~~
tanseydavid
MS cannot even explain their licensing at any detailed level unless you are
speaking with one of their own 'Licensing Experts'.

Not exaggerating -- this has scenario has played out again and again in my
dealings with MS going back almost 30 years.

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lucasar
Former Senior Windows SysAdmin here --worked in large scale infrastructures
and was the lead in a team dedicated to securing hundreds/thousands of
servers.

My answer: No f __*ing way.

I've seen too many times that pattern of "oh we fixed this security flaw on a
patch tuesday only to realize it opened a backdoor in some other way".
Securing Windows boxes is a pointless rat race. They have backdoors in them,
guaranteed.

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wenc
I administer a few Windows Servers. Unless you're heavily in the MS ecosystem
(Azure, AD etc.), or have software that only run on Windows, I can't think of
too many advantages that Winserver has from a server management perspective.
Maybe the admin GUI?

I understand that even on Microsoft Azure, most of the VMs being hosted are
running Linux.

[https://build5nines.com/linux-is-most-used-os-in-
microsoft-a...](https://build5nines.com/linux-is-most-used-os-in-microsoft-
azure-over-50-percent-fo-vm-cores/)

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schoolornot
Active Directory is a blessing compared to the hellish OSS alternatives. Don't
reply with suggestions to use FreeIPA. It can be just as bad or worse.

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HideousKojima
Samba is pretty decent

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LeSaucy
Thats like saying tires are a decent replacement for Uber.

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HideousKojima
How? Samba supports AD, and can work as a replacement for Windows AD (or
together with Windows DCs)

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potta_coffee
I've been using Linux for a long time, Windows servers have only been a small
part of my experience. At one point I decided I was going to invest more in
the open source side of things, I learned Linux / Python / Bash / Go / Nginx
and Apache, etc. I can use .NET and Windows server but I prefer not to. I
guess at this point what I'm saying is, it's too different from what I've
invested my skills in. I'm going to guess that others probably feel the same
way. Linux has huge mindshare in this space and making Windows server free is
not going to convince people to switch.

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jf-
Going against the grain here, yes, I would.

Professionally I haven’t been very involved in deployment, but my experience
deploying personal projects to, and configuring, Linux servers has taught me
that the process is confusing, poorly documented and difficult. Don’t get me
wrong, it’s doable and I’ve done it (likely poorly), but after a day of
stitching together steps from blogs and frequent back-tracking and starting
from scratch, you have to wonder if there isn’t a more user-friendly way.

I’d hope that windows server offers this, though I don’t know that it does, as
I haven’t much experience with it. As windows is considerably more GUI centric
than Linux that could be a big plus for me personally. I’d certainly check it
out, at least to compare the experience to Linux.

But currently, given that windows servers are not free, Linux wins hands down.

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blihp
No. Even if open sourced, no. There would be no benefit to me in doing so
(client or server) as it only has value for Windows users, which I no longer
am. I was a Windows user long enough to be able to say with a fair degree of
certainty that its code base would have little that I'd be interested in.

Look at it this way: if IBM released for free, or open sourced, a port of its
mainframe OS for PCs how many people would start using it? Unless one already
had a significant investment in IBM mainframe software, probably not very
many.

I'm all for competing ideas and alternate Operating Systems but don't view
commercial platforms as the place to look these days for good
ideas/implementations.

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perlgeek
I'd stay on Linux.

I've had too many experiences with sysadmin automation working out of the box
on Linux and being a total pain on windows to consider a switch.

For example: a project at $work was to deploy osquery on all our servers, and
write some of the data it produces to Kafka. The Windows package was delayed
for about 9 to 12 months compared to the Linux packages, due to a chain of
bugs, these bugs being fixed but not released, then the release was tagged but
there were no official builds etc.

Various config management tools seem to have only half-baked Windows support,
and so on.

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theevilsharpie
I might use it as a desktop, or for servers that had to run Windows-exclusive
software, but I wouldn't go out of my way to use it if Linux was available as
an option.

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linsomniac
It would be a huge expense for us to convert anything to "Free WinServer". We
would have to redevelop all of our infrastructure for deploying software,
porting and testing the software, configuring, monitoring, and deploying
machines... We're probably talking six figures of time and on top of that the
opportunity cost of not working on something else. We already have tools and
experience for using Linux for everything that doesn't absolutely require
Windows.

We really only run Windows for: MS-SQL, our dev workstations, and the backup
server for the dev workstations.

One real pain point for running Windows is the regular BSA or similar audits.
We try very hard to make sure that we are properly licensed, but when the
auditor comes knocking we have to spend around a week going through and
verifying everything, making sure that no licenses have expired, etc...

Even buying servers is made harder with Microsoft... "Ok, the license price
specifies X per core and Y for memory, so to hit the licensing and system
sweet spot we need this many cores but no more and this much memory."

With Linux we can just pick the system sweet spot for our use, and then at the
end of the year we send donations to open source projects we use. That can
sometimes be painful, (had problems with paypal for some of the most recent
donations), but the licensing terms are much more obvious and less
specialized.

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davedx
No.

.net core runs on Linux. Why would I invest in a new Windows server?

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ta17711771
Ironically, kernel security.

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bluedino
We have a datacenter license which isn't really that expensive, relatively
speaking. Windows isn't the expensive part. It's everything else.

Our SAN is expensive. Easily 10x the cost of the raw storage.

VMware is expensive. Backup software, management software, Exchange, our
wireless network solution, our MDM solution, that's all expensive.

RHEL isn't free either.

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pickle-wizard
You are not kidding on the price of SAN.

I just started a pilot program with the iXsystems TrueNAS, which is the
supported enterprise version of FreeNAS.

It was easily a 10th the price of everyone else I looked at. Plus the support
contact was inexpensive.

Now if I could just figure out something about our VMware licensing. I've
looked at RHEV, but we have a lot of automation built around VMware. It will
be very expensive to switch.

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jcmontx
I wouldn't. I'm an ASP.NET Core dev which is a MSFT technology and it runs
better on Linux.

I still choose Windows for development.

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donatj
Personally? No.

I gain nothing from Windows except overhead, particularly when it comes to
servers.

I generally pare my servers down to little more than the kernel, a firewall
and my very small handful of binaries for my application.

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transpute
The TCB would need to be open-source, e.g. Hyper-V, MinWin (or whatever the
smallest core of windows is called these days). There are several
virtualization-based security features in modern Windows, that would be
especially useful if the hypervisor could be inspected and collaboratively
developed, even if a Microsoft CLA were required for code contributions, and
they retained patents. An OSS TCB would ensure absence of telemetry. They can
still sell closed-source components that run on the OSS TCB.

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charlesdaniels
All of the languages I want to write software in work the same or better on
Linux compared to windows. All of my administrative and user experience is
with Linux. Linux seems to have better performance for almost every possible
use case, and has ZFS. I just don’t see any compelling reason to use Windows
Server for anything other than legacy. MS would have to cut me a sizable check
each month for my trouble.

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guitarbill
It depends on the use-case, but probably no. For most use-cases I can think of
(Active Directory), the cost is already negligible for a business.

What use-cases would be attractive for free versions? I can think of one, VMs.
But that experience already sucks. Windows images are larger, slower to boot,
and harder to automate.

It could be quite useful for CI though. And more CI providers might start
offering Windows platforms if it became free.

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captainmuon
I wouldn't start using it for things I currently use Linux for. The overhead
is just to high.

However, I might start to split my Windows Server VMs into multiple ones, so
one VM per function. Currently to conserve licenses, we put multiple roles on
one VM (and sometimes they have different requirements wrt. RAM or CPU heavy,
or critical vs non-critical...)

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Epixors
So far, the only use I've had for running Windows machines was running Adobe
After Effects for a render farm, because you can't run the Adobe suite on
Linux. I struggle to imagine workloads I'd want to run on Windows machines
voluntarily honestly, but I'm also unfamiliar with the ecosystem from a
sysadmin perspective.

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rietta
As a decades long FreeBSD and Linux user, I can say no, I would not use
Windows on a server come hell or high water for jobs that are already better
served on open source platforms. It is seldom the best tool for the job and
Microsoft's own metrics show that Linux will become predominate even in Azure.

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belltaco
This is a good point. Most people when comparing the popularity Linux vs
Windows Server or Apache vs. IIS ignore the fact that Windows Servers costs a
bunch. A proper comparison would be if both were free or cost the same. I
wonder how the server wars would have turned out if that were the case.

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nailer
No. The point of Windows Server at its peak (around 2000) was that it was an
easy to manage server OS.

I don't want to manage any servers. No boxes, no kubernetes, no anything. I
have have some code, I pay my cloud provider for an execution environment and
that's it.

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kortilla
What would it buy? Unless the org suddenly switches to a different tech stack
that requires winserver, it’s kinda the worst of both worlds - none of the
upside of Windows, none of the huge open source ecosystem of Linux.

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g051051
No. If it had something you needed, and that you could only get from Windows,
you'd be using it already. Any shop that can make use of an alternative pretty
much already does, and would have no reason to switch.

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astockwell
I know great strides have been made in recent years, but Microsoft would have
to communicate a much better 'configuration automation' story to significantly
move the voluntary adoption needle for this crowd.

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goldfishlover
I probably would have a few years ago, now-a-days almost everything I do seems
to be deployed as a linux container directly or linux containers by way of
'cloud functions'

funnily enough I use windows as my workstation os

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serkandurusoy
Very small (less than 20 people) non-tech businesses, especially those with
on-site culture can actually benefit a lot from such a deal.

The management UI's are actually useful and almost a must have for many
people.

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Shoreleave
It might cause me to upgrade current windows servers instead of migrating them
to Linux. But I doubt I'd start new projects with it.

If mssqlserver also became open source then that might change my mind.

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tryauuum
I would have put it in a virtual machine to play windows games more easily.
Gaming on windows server 2019, how fun is that!

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mrmonkeyman
The cost is stepping in the Microsoft tarpit. No chance in hell I'm getting
near it.

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usrusr
I'd prefer to avoid the skillset lock-in, even if it was free.

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cududa
This is something I call a “wish in one hand, sh*t in the other , see which
fills up faster” scenario. There is no way Microsoft could make as much as
they do now on Server if they switched to a “services and consulting” model.

~~~
tobias3
Also currently there is a bit of an incentive to make it user friendly.

If it becomes "consulting-ware" like Linux there would be an incentive to make
it user-unfriendly and complicate it with high costumizability, bad UI and bad
defaults.

