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Comment by taligent | Hacker News Reader

What is a "server" operating system exactly ?

Because there is nothing inherently different between CentOS on the desktop and on the server for example.

I think most open source people would say an server os is one without a GUI. People are forgetting Windows Server is still largely the same as Windows on the desktop.

Windows Server has a ton of features not present in the desktop versions. For example IIS running on a Windows 7 desktop is capped at 10 concurrent connections for licensing reasons.

Whereas I could install a desktop distro + apache on my server and serve as many requests as the hardware can physically handle. The only difference would be that default settings would probably not be well optimised for that use case, but some reconfiguration would solve that.

Unix people, AIX had CDE but no one used it, same for Solaris last time I checked it, but it was a couple of years ago.

That's not really true. The current version of Windows Server by default has no GUI (and almost no services). It's configured completely from the command line (or if you follow Microsoft's guidance, remotely via powershell remoting).

I certainly wouldn't recommend any shops currently using Linux servers to switch them out, but Windows Server has come a ridiculously long way from being super sucky to being a good server operating system.

That must be new. It's been a few years since I've used windows server.

Yeah, Gui-less was an option on Server 2008, but not the default. The default for 2012 is what they call "server core" (no GUI, no desktop services).

I was surprised when I took a look at Windows Server recently. I'd sort of mentally written it off a decade ago, but Microsoft has done a commendable amount of work in improving it.

Again, I don't think there's anything about it that I'd tell current Linux admins to swap out their servers for (even ignoring the license costs), but they've improved Windows Server enough that I no longer recommend that existing folks abandon it.

Also, for what it's worth, Powershell is quite possibly the best thing Microsoft has come up with in 20 years. Yes, it's embarrassing that it took that long to get Windows command-line administration to what Unix people have been doing since the 70's, but they've implemented it in a genuinely smart way.

Apple runs massive datacenters. Because they own OS X, they can run it on whatever hardware they want.

Is Apple running OS X in its datacenters? My understanding is that they are not.

A server OS is manageable, can be run headless, and is performant in server workloads.

I have never heard anyone argue that OS X can compete on any performance metric with Linux or FreeBSD.

I'd put money on them using a lot of Linux like most sane data center operators do.

One good test is if they have a decent track record on pushing CVE fixes. Apple tends to hold theirs to about once a quarter unless something is in very common use. They intentionally hold them back so that people don't have to click update too often.

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