5 ms·

Yes, "windows shops" are stupid, you got that right. Windows is a toy in the server space, always as been, always will be.

pjmlp 3y ago
Plenty of big boys money goes through such "toy" servers.
- _cenw 3y ago
  Is that because Microsoft is good at selling it or because it is actually a good piece of tech? We recently had to set up some Microsoft platinum partner test automation software, and the money we spent on SQL Server and Windows instances (on Azure of course) alone could've funded a fleet of Linux servers or a junior dev writing Playwright scripts all day. (Not to mention it produces unactionable output by default, and if I love one thing, it's "this page didn't work one out of 100 times, must be infra problem" incidents)
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    You would have spent similar amount of money in Red-Hat Licenses, or anyone else worth using with big boys support contracts. Linux is only free when our time isn't worth money. Playwright is developed by Microsoft, by the way.
    - _cenw 3y ago
      > Linux is only free when our time isn't worth money. that's funny, because having rotated through all 3 major cloud providers in the past 5 years now (at different places), Azure support is the most time-wasting not worth it even if it was free, and i'd much prefer if i could waste my time reading documentation that makes sense, but Azure doesn't have that either. Azure doesn't happen to be an outlier in Microsoft products, right? > Playwright is developed by Microsoft, by the way. And I'm happy the people there get to make things that work outside the eldritch horror that is Windows Server.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        I have found the first person that doesn't have issues with GCP, former employee with internal contacts?
        _cenw 3y ago
        I had issues with GCP too, including bricked projects, but I appreciate more about it than Azure, the permission model in particular is great if you want to limit the damage fully independent teams (with... an inventive spirit) can do while making resource sharing much easier across boundaries than AWS accounts or Azure subscriptions. And even though the first answer to a ticket is always useless, at least you get something useful within 24 hours, whereas Azure support feels like I'm talking to ChatGPT sometimes, inventing issues in services I didn't request support for that sound similar (VPN Gateway turned into API Gateway) and then going silent for a week.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      > Linux is only free when our time isn't worth money. Oh, man, not this shit. Linux saves time. Windows servers are an endless time sink, that costs more on its hardware, and have added license costs. And license costs are also mostly the time you spend managing your licenses, the actual money you send to Microsoft is peanuts. Windows only costs its price if your time is worthless.
      - temporarara 3y ago
        This. When it comes to serious use I wouldn't trust anybody who doesn't bother to invest a lot of time to actually learn the system anyway. IMO Windows servers are not easier to learn than Linux servers, quite the contrary actually, but I'm a bit biased since my personal computer runs Linux too. In my experience the choice is usually made by the familiarity rather than ideology. Windows server can definitely be a better choice if they already successfully use it. And that's the case even if a Linux based server would be actually better for their use case based on some arbitrary metrics. Some are so ideologically challenged that they use both and see no problem.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Linux saves time is an oxymoron.
    - vajrabum 3y ago
      Systems engineer here, I haven't worked at a company that pays for Linux support in 12 years and this was at scale (10K+ servers). You don't need IBM or Canonical to get patches or a heads up about major vulns. Several ways to go with this but I get up to date patches for free with Debian. And I can count on my hand the number of times that any org I've been part of needed a kernel engineer or access to one. Support contracts for OS AFAIK aren't worth the money any more unless you really don't have anyone who can do system support.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        That is why so many freetards are angry with CentOS acquision.
        vajrabum 3y ago
        Freetards? Do you make money from an OS, compiler or similar infrastructure? If not, then your employer would in my opinion be making a mistake to send $$$ to a vendor of same unless they're in a very special niche. One of the only enduring lessons from IT history is that there's always going to come a time to move on from some technology or vendor. And IBM isn't doing wrong by trying to capture some cash but it's very late in this game and its a losing battle. I'm guessing that it's going to be the 'legacy' cloud vendor's time soon. The markup is way out of whack.
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      It somehow never actually happens this way, but I would happily spend twice as much for any open source product simply because I get more control, predictability, and utility out of it. If you want to pay rather a lot more than merely twice as much you can get source from MS too, and still not get all the utility because it comes with ndas and no ocean of other user hackers who want the same obvious things you do. Spending time on an open tool is an investment that you do because it pays off. Spending your own time, or paying a developer (hired in house or consultant), or paying license fees for a closed product are all just things you spend to get the result. It has nothing to do with your time being worthless. If your own time is too super valuable to spend directly building, then the choice is not "pay MS to do it or do it myself", it's pay an employee to do it one way or pay an employee to do it another way. You pay an employee 100k and MS 100k, or you pay 2 employees. You get 10x more value out of two humans producing work that you 100% own and get to have every important detail exactly how you want it, and then it works for as long as you want it. Even with the churn from security updates and popular fads, anything you invested in building, you still get to use forever if you want. No serial number ever expires, no activation ever blocks your ability to make backups and hot spares and parallel extra capacity. And those humans actively solve new weird problems in a way no piece of software or software licence ever can. The reason not to pay MS is not because it costs money, it's because you get shit for it.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        A nice utopic world that I never experienced.
        Brian_K_White 3y ago
        I do. Shrug.
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
mardifoufs 3y ago
Why is windows server a toy?
- pjmlp 3y ago
  I guess because it gets all the games, to the point Valve needs to create a Linux distribution that pretends to be Windows to be able to sell any meaningfull games to GNU/Linux folks, not even Android/NDK games get ported over.
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Yeah it's insane how downplayed windows is in some tech circles. I personally don't even like it, but that's mainly because of a skill issue on my part (I don't know how to use it well). Yet it is very clearly not a toy, and in some ways it's way more powerful than Linux due to things like active directory and everything. I wouldn't run a random server on it but that's completely irrelevant to it being a toy or not. In reality as you said tons of effort are spent exactly trying to make Linux good at the things windows has been good at for 30 years. But there's that weird dissonance that makes people think that windows is inferior to Linux on a technical level just because it's inferior on a software license/freedom level. The two are completely unrelated. The funniest thing is people who argue that the Linux kernel is just the future compared to the "antiquated" NT kernel (lol, lmao)

pjmlp 3y ago

Plenty of big boys money goes through such "toy" servers.

_cenw 3y ago
Is that because Microsoft is good at selling it or because it is actually a good piece of tech? We recently had to set up some Microsoft platinum partner test automation software, and the money we spent on SQL Server and Windows instances (on Azure of course) alone could've funded a fleet of Linux servers or a junior dev writing Playwright scripts all day. (Not to mention it produces unactionable output by default, and if I love one thing, it's "this page didn't work one out of 100 times, must be infra problem" incidents)
- pjmlp 3y ago
  You would have spent similar amount of money in Red-Hat Licenses, or anyone else worth using with big boys support contracts. Linux is only free when our time isn't worth money. Playwright is developed by Microsoft, by the way.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    > Linux is only free when our time isn't worth money. that's funny, because having rotated through all 3 major cloud providers in the past 5 years now (at different places), Azure support is the most time-wasting not worth it even if it was free, and i'd much prefer if i could waste my time reading documentation that makes sense, but Azure doesn't have that either. Azure doesn't happen to be an outlier in Microsoft products, right? > Playwright is developed by Microsoft, by the way. And I'm happy the people there get to make things that work outside the eldritch horror that is Windows Server.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      I have found the first person that doesn't have issues with GCP, former employee with internal contacts?
      - _cenw 3y ago
        I had issues with GCP too, including bricked projects, but I appreciate more about it than Azure, the permission model in particular is great if you want to limit the damage fully independent teams (with... an inventive spirit) can do while making resource sharing much easier across boundaries than AWS accounts or Azure subscriptions. And even though the first answer to a ticket is always useless, at least you get something useful within 24 hours, whereas Azure support feels like I'm talking to ChatGPT sometimes, inventing issues in services I didn't request support for that sound similar (VPN Gateway turned into API Gateway) and then going silent for a week.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > Linux is only free when our time isn't worth money. Oh, man, not this shit. Linux saves time. Windows servers are an endless time sink, that costs more on its hardware, and have added license costs. And license costs are also mostly the time you spend managing your licenses, the actual money you send to Microsoft is peanuts. Windows only costs its price if your time is worthless.
    - temporarara 3y ago
      This. When it comes to serious use I wouldn't trust anybody who doesn't bother to invest a lot of time to actually learn the system anyway. IMO Windows servers are not easier to learn than Linux servers, quite the contrary actually, but I'm a bit biased since my personal computer runs Linux too. In my experience the choice is usually made by the familiarity rather than ideology. Windows server can definitely be a better choice if they already successfully use it. And that's the case even if a Linux based server would be actually better for their use case based on some arbitrary metrics. Some are so ideologically challenged that they use both and see no problem.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Linux saves time is an oxymoron.
  - vajrabum 3y ago
    Systems engineer here, I haven't worked at a company that pays for Linux support in 12 years and this was at scale (10K+ servers). You don't need IBM or Canonical to get patches or a heads up about major vulns. Several ways to go with this but I get up to date patches for free with Debian. And I can count on my hand the number of times that any org I've been part of needed a kernel engineer or access to one. Support contracts for OS AFAIK aren't worth the money any more unless you really don't have anyone who can do system support.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      That is why so many freetards are angry with CentOS acquision.
      - vajrabum 3y ago
        Freetards? Do you make money from an OS, compiler or similar infrastructure? If not, then your employer would in my opinion be making a mistake to send $$$ to a vendor of same unless they're in a very special niche. One of the only enduring lessons from IT history is that there's always going to come a time to move on from some technology or vendor. And IBM isn't doing wrong by trying to capture some cash but it's very late in this game and its a losing battle. I'm guessing that it's going to be the 'legacy' cloud vendor's time soon. The markup is way out of whack.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    It somehow never actually happens this way, but I would happily spend twice as much for any open source product simply because I get more control, predictability, and utility out of it. If you want to pay rather a lot more than merely twice as much you can get source from MS too, and still not get all the utility because it comes with ndas and no ocean of other user hackers who want the same obvious things you do. Spending time on an open tool is an investment that you do because it pays off. Spending your own time, or paying a developer (hired in house or consultant), or paying license fees for a closed product are all just things you spend to get the result. It has nothing to do with your time being worthless. If your own time is too super valuable to spend directly building, then the choice is not "pay MS to do it or do it myself", it's pay an employee to do it one way or pay an employee to do it another way. You pay an employee 100k and MS 100k, or you pay 2 employees. You get 10x more value out of two humans producing work that you 100% own and get to have every important detail exactly how you want it, and then it works for as long as you want it. Even with the churn from security updates and popular fads, anything you invested in building, you still get to use forever if you want. No serial number ever expires, no activation ever blocks your ability to make backups and hot spares and parallel extra capacity. And those humans actively solve new weird problems in a way no piece of software or software licence ever can. The reason not to pay MS is not because it costs money, it's because you get shit for it.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      A nice utopic world that I never experienced.
      - Brian_K_White 3y ago
        I do. Shrug.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

mardifoufs 3y ago

Why is windows server a toy?

pjmlp 3y ago
I guess because it gets all the games, to the point Valve needs to create a Linux distribution that pretends to be Windows to be able to sell any meaningfull games to GNU/Linux folks, not even Android/NDK games get ported over.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Yeah it's insane how downplayed windows is in some tech circles. I personally don't even like it, but that's mainly because of a skill issue on my part (I don't know how to use it well). Yet it is very clearly not a toy, and in some ways it's way more powerful than Linux due to things like active directory and everything. I wouldn't run a random server on it but that's completely irrelevant to it being a toy or not. In reality as you said tons of effort are spent exactly trying to make Linux good at the things windows has been good at for 30 years. But there's that weird dissonance that makes people think that windows is inferior to Linux on a technical level just because it's inferior on a software license/freedom level. The two are completely unrelated. The funniest thing is people who argue that the Linux kernel is just the future compared to the "antiquated" NT kernel (lol, lmao)