[plug] windows - a rant

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 23:08, Craig Foster wrote:

> While I love Linux, I work with Windows all day, and there are times I wish
> Linux could do the things Windows.

Power management, anybody? Sure, I have suspend and hibernate now - but
about 4 years behind the times, and it's still more stable under 2k. No,
I'm not intending to whine about nobody magically doing it earlier, but
rather pointing out that there are real areas of lag.

> Active Directory and profiles are nowhere even close on Linux. Take a school
> environment, and add 1500 students that move around all the time, require
> software to be there waiting for them when they enter the class room, and
> are generally little brats. Linux+LDAP+Kerberos+NFS+Samba+rsync+..+..+..
> can't do this kind of stuff easily. Just take software installation by group
> policy, user profile replication across WANs, processor affinity, and other
> "enterprise" stuff.

Yep. We have processor affinity now, but not so much of the rest, or not
all that well anyway. User policy, for example, feels sadly trapped in
the non-networked non-GUI unix days to me. There is some support for
network policy (via iptables) and some support for GUI policy control
(esp in KDE), but it doesn't fit together very well at all and is rather
incomplete IMHO.

Of course, it could be argued that sometimes one is better off without
AD - ever tried to demote a 2k domain controller? I hope you backed up
the entire network, right down to the desktops, because there's a good
chance you'll need those backups. AD does some great stuff, but it often
seems a bit fragile. Schema additions, for example, are strictly one way
and can go very badly wrong.

> There's a lot of spiffy stuff that Linux is playing catchup on, while
> Microsoft adds features every version.

Yep. That game goes two ways at times, though. Package management and
version control in the OS comes to mind. "I have this virus, but I
installed the patch to prevent it. What gives?" "You re-installed the
service pack, didn't you?".

> This is why I'm interested in eDirectory on Suse.

Yeah. I'm not in the market for that sort of stuff at work, but I can
see how improving manageability is _badly_ needed for Linux. Sometimes
you just need to ask "rather than try to make Linux do this the MS way,
is there another approach that might work better?" ... but sometimes, it
just doesn't do what you need, full stop.

> I'm still hoping that Linux gets a better foothold in the medium to large
> business space....

Indeed. It doesn't seem to be doing badly, warts and all, as it is
though. Given my success with our core Linux server here, I can
understand why - for servers, many (but not most) of the manageability
answers are already there IMHO. Especially when you frequently don't
have to keep as many of them as you do for Windows servers, and can
dedicate roles to them quite neatly. I do wish Linux distros would
provde better integrated support for LDAP, though - LDAP mail aliases
and mail routing, built-in tools for LDAP user management, etc. You can
do it all, but it's often a severe case of re-inventing the wheel.

Speaking of LDAP-for-literally-everything: Leon, is it just me or did
you write nearly half of the previous Australian Developer issue
single-handedly?

Craig Ringer