Monday, April 05, 2010

The pros and cons of working with Linux

Recently at work my duties with the Linux servers has been increasing. I'm really excited to work with Linux and gain experience but it's also somewhat frustrating at the same time. So coming from a Windows background I noted some things that are different about Linux, both good and bad points.

Applications need to be complied in Linux

Not all applications but a good amount need to be complied, then run some scripts to have them installed. It's not difficult but when things go wrong, takes some time to figure out, what's really causing the issue. At first this was the biggest problem I had switching over to Linux. Why would a software vendor send out applications that are not even ready to install?

After working with some problematic Windows applications I started to see the light. Many times in the Windows world, we would be required to install some applications that are questionable. Not in terms of they have malware issues but problems in how they were developed, hard coded names, etc. In one application we had many issues because the timeout of a child process was extremely short, so short that any lag in the network caused the entire application to crash. Perhaps in a Linux version we could have seen this in a config file and made the change?

Open Source in Linux application

This is more of a personal preference than anything else. I've worked mostly on commerical applicaitons, for example Microsoft Windows family, Microsoft Exchange, or any other popular applicaiton used in the business environment.

We'll see how well Open Source works for me in the future so far there are some projects it's really helping but also it's somewhat hard to get the correct support.

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