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by custardcream 4232 days ago
Similar situation. I deal with Unix/windows approximately 50/50 from a devops perspective. My word I'll also take anything Unix over windows at the moment regardless of the tech. To be fair in the short term, windows is maximally productive but if you hit an edge case or a rough spot you're SOL, especially if it involves Microsoft support or scripting. Rough edges cost me a lot of money and willpower.

An example: I opened a case when IE9 was in developer preview with partner support. When they rewrote the download manager in IE for this release they changed how download prompting worked and removed a setting from the UI (and left it in the registry). This broke ClickOnce launches entirely for over 2000 users for us. Fast forward nearly 5 years and it's still broken, the case is still open and to get everything to work for the client we have to frig a registry setting on every workstation they roll out. That sucks for us and the client, badly.

This is a typical story for us. When you deal with VSTO, MSI packaging, managing large clusters of windows server machines, random bugs that just blow up in your face suddenly after working for years, signing code, trying to get repeatable builds out of a CLR solution and automating all of these things, forget it. PowerShell gets you 80% of the way there but the last 20% is a tar pit of pain and impossibility.

Now I've been in the Microsoft ecosystem for 20 years, certified and bought into it all. Perhaps I'm bitter and tired but I can't see past all this experience and have mixed memories of c#. All I see is hung instances of visual studio and working out which project file is buggered and all this is destroying the best language I ever used. I don't want to waste my life on giving them another chance.

There is literally none of the above on Unix platforms from experience. I've only encountered one bug in the last 15 years due to a CIFS kernel bug and RH fixed it within two days. I haven't had any automation friction at all.

I'm worn out and confused to be honest when I read back this post.
1 comments
pjmlp 4232 days ago
> There is literally none of the above on Unix platforms from experience.

Have you worked in commercial UNIXes?

I have some HP-UX, Aix and Solaris war stories.

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custardcream 4232 days ago
Yes, SunOS4, Solaris and HP-UX. Never had any problems but then again we pretty much kept the hardware alive after vendors had deployed everything. Also Oracle on a VMS cluster which was a joy.

To be honest windows (NT series) operating systems were pretty trouble free in the NT4 era. The masses of fragmentation and numerous paradigm shifts were what broke it all for me.

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