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by gunmetal 5015 days ago
Even a Joyent tech admits Ubuntu is a more pleasant experience. Thought this was interesting, but all his points are not isolated to the desktop experience. Pretty much all the reasons he switched to linux affect the building and maintenance of servers too. I think it just boils down to community support.
1 comments
pjmlp 5015 days ago
I will read the article later, when I have more time, but many geeks that only know Linux and eventually BSD, have no idea how painful commercial UNIX systems can be.

Several of our customers have HP-UX systems that look like plain System V systems straight out of the 70's.

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dredmorbius 5015 days ago
That was my first response to Linux when I was first trying it out. Back in the mid 1990s.

At the userland level especially, it didn't suck, and (with the GNU userland, windowmanagers, etc.), in fact, sucked radically less than stock commercial Unices I'd been using at the time (Sun, HP, AT&T, Data General, BSD).

The situation's only gotten much, much better.

I'll occasionally find myself in situations where I'm connecting to commercial Unix boxes (was a semi-recent shop where a fair number of staff still ran CDE desktops), and, really, it's painful. Doable, but painful.

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wazoox 5015 days ago
Sure HP/UX and friends always were terrible, but in 1995 I actually failed in love with Unix thanks to IRIX. IRIX really had a nice UI, easy to use management interfaces, powerful multimedia capabilities. Only installing anew it was bringing me back to the stone age (particularly the partitioning part, "inst" package manager was actually decent).
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gaius 5014 days ago
Commercial systems operate under constraints that Linux didn't have until recently, such as needing to maintain backwards compatibility. This went all the way from not changing the interface for people who used workstations for highly skilled works but were not "geeks" (e.g. CAD guys), to sticking with old shells (e.g. Sun stuck with ksh long after Linux had bash). Witness the furore over the GNOME team changing things a couple of weeks ago...
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adestefan 5015 days ago
The first task for the first real job I ever had was to get gcc 2.something running on an HP-UX 9 system. I still have nightmares.
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mcguire 5015 days ago
Does HP-UX still want you to use the newgrp command all the time?
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