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Comment by danielovichdk | Hacker News Reader

Why should it be? Honest question.

Cause it is more work to manage windows servers than it is to manage Linux servers. Less work is better than more work so Linux is better for server implementations.

But I guess that is something people will argue over for a long long time.

Well... my opinion, based on my experience...

If you have people experienced in managing Windows, but not Linux, then it's less work to manage Windows servers.

You can learn how to manage Linux and then get even less work.

Anyway...

I was certainly not saying that there are not scenarios where it is better to go with windows servers. Things don't happen in a vacuum.

There's always a better solution for something that you can learn. But would it be better for everybody if the SO authors spent months learning Linux administration and non-.net web platform, or if they applied their existing knowledge to create SO immediately?

No, I just said it wouldn't be better... there are many scenarios where the best way to do something in one perspective is not the best seen from another perspective.

> Cause it is more work to manage windows servers than it is to manage Linux servers.

This isn't true. I managed and supported a fleet of Windows and Linux servers for a web hosting company for 14 years. Both OS's have their time sinks and gravity wells of failure.

So both have time sinks... how does that permis effect my statement? I said one is worse. You say both suck time, which is obviously true, work takes time.

You can disagree with me ok, but if you want to convince me that I am wrong it would be nice with substantiated material.

You hadn't offered any substantive material in support of your own opinion either.

As a sysadmin with 30 years of experience running Linux and Windows servers though, I'll offer my own anecdote - I'd say that Windows is far easier to manage for many common scenarios. It's all point and click and you can basically figure out what to do without looking at any documentation anywhere.

It's so easy, you can teach a monkey how to configure a workgroup, domain, users, dns server, firewall, etc. on Windows.

Also, which Linux distro are you talking about? What with all the fragmentation, nothing is ever the same on every distro.

That's putting it mildly. A lot of the time things aren't even the same on the same distro 2 years later, which is incredibly annoying when the only documentation you can find is for the wrong version.

I did not substantiate my claim cause I did not argue against anything.

Figuring stuff out without documentation when there is documentation is a bad idea. If you know what to do the GUI can guide you a bit, but it does not do work for you. If you want to do something that you don't understand you should really read more about it, the context being irrelevant.

I doubt you could teach a monkey to do anything like that.

At my last work we used the same distro for everything, why make it hard for yourself. Personally I think most things are the same in the most commonly used distros. Everything is generally just a file. Use mount to mount disks /dev /etc /var folders all standard normal stuff.

Well, why shouldn't it? The way I see it, a FOSS technology stack should be the default, and using the proprietary and expensive one must be justified, as in saving significant amounts of money, or coming with some absolutely necessary technical advantages. The fact that SO is an exception (a high-profile site built on MS stack while not being affiliated with MS) kind of proves the point.

>a FOSS technology stack should be the default, and using the proprietary and expensive one must be justified

You're ignoring overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Licenses are a drop in the ocean compared to the cost of long term ongoing management of your platform(s).

That was my first reaction when I saw this comment. Why should everything be in Linux? Also considering that SO does the job and does it very well.

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