linux

I've spent quite alot of time to read all the definitions gave by one or another. I'm both a linux & windows user and in the same time admin. I'm so much afraid i'll start to do devil's advocacy here for linux, but from my point of view i'm pretty much entitled to. I'm in charge for about 400 workstations and something like 170 servers. Both types (wks & srv) runs either linux or windows. Do you folks have any ideea which is the % of the wks's suffering from sudden death like about 2 or 3 months of intensive work on them? Take a wild guess!. So, as i'm sure you already guessed what i'm talking about, i come and say: "Why in the name of God i would waste my time and my nerves on reinstalling friggin MS stuff like every 2 - 3 months", when i could just simply just check them once in a while and have them running for 1 year +. Of course it's not my call. Just as some of you like MS and some of you Linux, my users have their preferences too, therefore i got Norton Ghost to work for those bloody Windows wks's. But then again, happy people coming to work are those working on linux workstation. Debian or Gentoo powered (dont remind me of RedHat/Fedora/CentOS as they are Windows's cousins lately), my workstations are rocking from simple text files editing (OpenOffice rules by the way) to Multimedia rich applications (if you dont know there is SDL - Simple DirectMedia Layer linux alternative of DirectX as well as TransGaming's new DirectX 8 API's support in linux for latest Remedy Enterprise's Max Payne with 3D acceleration). However .. going to the server side of my story all my servers are running Linux or various flavours of BSD. I used to have some NT and 2000 or 2003 servers that i got rid off due to their instability and inconsistency plus extremely bad memory management. Benchmarking the systems it came up that on two hardware identical servers, one with linux and the other with windows 2000 advanced server, each of them with two processors and 4 GB DDR2 memory, under a stress test with 300 simultaneous clients each of them sending 1000 (one thousand) simultaneous queries to their respective localhost databases (mysql for linux and msql for windows) the windows machine bent over kneeling in front of linux. I'm sorry to dissapoint you Windows fans but Linux is better, or you would prefere to say GNU/Linux since it's widely accepted as a name for this awsome OS. And Yes, it's an OS even if at origins Linux was the name of a MINIX based free OS with a monolithic kernel, created by Linus Torvalds. Do you even know that the name "Linux" was a mistake?. By the time Linus Torvalds finished his first version of what we know today as Linux he named it Freax, but when he asked his friend Ari Lemmke (at that time the FTP admin at funet.fi) to put the new OS online for public access, his friend gave him a directory on ftp with the name Linux. And for you ignorants i repeat: Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system. It's not the name of the kernel. And also i saw many of you stating Linux is an OS accepted by geeks and nerds. Righty .. then IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Novell are all some cheap-azz companies ran by nerds and geeks. If you say so ... Also news for you cool guys from geeks like us .. Sony Playstation 3 will be running Linux too as confirmed by Sony's CEO Ken Kutaragi. So judging by this news Linux still not being a proper gaming environment right?.. Duh!. Take care with what you wish as the OS for your computer. Over & Out Andy