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Ask HN: If WinServer2019 was made free to use tomorrow,would you start using it
If Microsoft decided to make using Windows Server 2019 (all edition) free to use tomorrow, would you start using it? And if so how?
Would you be more likely to adopt it if Microsoft open-sourced it? (I know very little chance of that)
In either case Microsoft could make money on support, and consulting services.
I think more competition on the server side, than various flavours of Linux and some flavours of UNIX would be healthy.
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.
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)
- astockwell 6y agoI 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.
- cududa 6y agoThis 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.
- kortilla 6y agoWhat 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.
- Epixors 6y agoSo 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.
- theevilsharpie 6y agoI 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.
- schoolornot 6y agoActive 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.
- HideousKojima 6y agoSamba is pretty decent
- LeSaucy 6y agoThats like saying tires are a decent replacement for Uber.
- HideousKojima 6y agoHow? Samba supports AD, and can work as a replacement for Windows AD (or together with Windows DCs)
- timw4mail 6y agoSamba is SMB/CIFS, a file sharing implementation. How does that relate to Active Directory, other than file permissions?
- xav0989 6y agoSamba is also an Active Directory Domain Controller[0]. While its not a perfect implementation of the system, it's sufficient for many usecases. [0]: https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting_up_Samba_as_an_Active_Directory_Domain_Controller https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting_up_Samba_as_an_Acti...
- chopraaa 6y agoYou don't need Windows to use Active Directory.
- neverartful 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- donatj 6y agoPersonally? 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.
- achn 6y agoMicrosoft 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 6y agoAre 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.
- llarsson 6y agoIs 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 6y ago> Is there a HN approved way of doing this? Yes. Not using Windows to begin with.
- elviswolcott 6y agoGetting windows signature devices is a good start. It doesn't get rid of the baked in telemetry, but it does ensure you're getting a fresh copy of windows (with Candy Crush and whatever store apps they decide to install) without any of the bloatware OEMs like to install.
- wenc 6y agoI 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-azure-over-50-percent-fo-vm-cores/ https://build5nines.com/linux-is-most-used-os-in-microsoft-a...
- guitarbill 6y agoIt 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.
- transpute 6y agoThe 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.
- g051051 6y agoNo. 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.
- rietta 6y agoAs 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.
- davedx 6y agoNo. .net core runs on Linux. Why would I invest in a new Windows server?
- ta17711771 6y agoIronically, kernel security.
- mrmonkeyman 6y agoThe cost is stepping in the Microsoft tarpit. No chance in hell I'm getting near it.
- blihp 6y agoNo. 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.
- belltaco 6y agoThis 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.
- nailer 6y agoNo. 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.
- Shoreleave 6y agoIt 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.
- potta_coffee 6y agoI'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.
- bluedino 6y agoWe 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.
- pickle-wizard 6y agoYou 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.
- ThinkBeat 6y agoThe SAN would be equally expensive in any OS context would it not? The few times I have been peripherally involved with acquiring on-site enterprise SAN storage the prices have been out of this world but not every dependent on what the OS accessing the thing is
- serkandurusoy 6y agoVery 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.
- emeraldd 6y agoSimple 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 6y agoMS 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.
- goldfishlover 6y agoI 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
- linsomniac 6y agoIt 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.
- usrusr 6y agoI'd prefer to avoid the skillset lock-in, even if it was free.
- lucasar 6y agoFormer 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.
- perlgeek 6y agoI'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.
- captainmuon 6y agoI 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...)
- charlesdaniels 6y agoAll 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.
- jf- 6y agoGoing 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.
- jcmontx 6y agoI 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.
- tryauuum 6y agoI would have put it in a virtual machine to play windows games more easily. Gaming on windows server 2019, how fun is that!