Worst OS ever! You should read what Dana Blankhorn had to say about your beloved linux! I'll give you a hint, its not good. I can't believe they would release a distro with known harddrive bugs. I'm going to laugh at you when you lose all your data due to corruption.
Are you prepared to spend hours recompiling your kernel? Getting sound configured so it plays more than one at a time? Wishing you had a rich multimedia experience? If so, then linux is for you.
The rest of us will see this as just another ho-hum yawn linux distro release that doesn't offer anything new. I wonder if ZDNet is even going to mention it. Remember how unsuccessful Ubuntu 9.04's release was? ZDNet only had the article on the front page for about 2 hours max because there was no excitement. Nobody gets excited about linux because it is boring! That and the fact nobody wants to use it including Linus T. himself who calls it scarey and bloated and is considering halting development of the kernel.
Which is another point, when that stops you will lose all support and not having support is a bad thing within any organization. Telling your boss to wait a week while you look up the answer on the forums isn't going to fly over well.
There are just too many things wrong with linux to make it usable!
My budget manager has already told me to be really conservative as I begin the FY11 budgeting process. I have a few sacred cows and some key line items that I know will be funded, but those Windows 7 upgrades I was looking at? Ummm, yeah…I’m not looking at them anymore.
What I am looking at is a web server and a netbook, happily running their upgrades to Ubuntu 9.10. The web server (I just built it yesterday, actually, to run the Joomla! CMS to which I’m porting our distinctly unfriendly district website) was running 9.04. The netbook was running a beta of 9.10. Both cheerfully told me this morning that an upgrade to Version 9.10 was available.
“Would you like to upgrade?” they asked.
“Sure,” I said, as I clicked the upgrade button.
That was it.
[See also: Yes, Ubuntu can absolutely be the default Windows alternative]
Even though the main download mirrors have been hammered today, the server informed me that with my connection, I should expect the download and install to take a few hours (the upgrades happen from software repositories, not the mirrors that contain the install image). About two hours for the netbook. Great. I need one of those Staples “That Was Easy” buttons. [
Having run the upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 beta, I’m not too worried about any snags. We’ll see how my freshly configured Joomla! install holds up after the upgrade, but since I was already using the most up-to-date versions of MySQL, Apache, and PHP, there shouldn’t be any issues there, either. I’ll update this post when the installs finish, but that isn’t really even the point here.
The point is that I don’t need to budget for this upgrade. I don’t need to obtain volume licenses and decide where to deploy them. I don’t need to do anything except click the Easy, errr, Upgrade button. Even if we had to pay for it and properly license it, wouldn’t it be slick if we could open Windows Update in XP or Vista, choose an optional OS upgrade, enter our volume license key, and then walk away?
Of course, it would be even slicker if it was free.
Windows 7 is great and a lot of people would argue that it’s worth paying for. Since I work in a system that has a significant investment in Microsoft technologies, both on the back end and the client side, I’d actually be one of them. However, as I look for ways to trim my budget next year, I sure wish cutting costs was as easy as the most recent Ubuntu upgrade.
