Open-source fight on the 'wrong battleground'

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You make some good points.

Certainly there are other costs associated with supporting an OS. But that's any OS, not just Linux. Say your $60 to $80K rep (frankly, that's WAY higher than industry standard for front line tech support, but that's a different matter) is a reasonably skilled computer expert. (S)he's been through several years of training in school, has used those big university Unix systems, knows Windows fairly well, maybe even has some familiarity with MacOS.

((I just described myself a couple years ago, BTW.))

Which OS is going to be harder to teach this person to support? Linux, or Windows XP? Each OS has aspects that will make it simple to troubleshoot, and aspects that will make it complex.

The Bad:
With Windows, each version seems to change where utilities are kept, the registry changes, etc.
With Linux, each system may very well be extremely customized, so you can't rely on GUI tools being where you would expect them to be.

The Good:
With Windows, the overall look and feel to the OS will generally remain consistent from system to system. And if all troubleshooting fails, systems are fairly easy to restore.
With Linux, the command line utilities are going to function the same way regardless of distro. And if all troubleshooting fails, systems are almost ridiculously easy to restore. (Sorry, Linux wins on this one).

Now, as for the user experience? These days, if you put a complete luddite in front of a properly configured desktop Linux machine, they'll have just as easy or just as hard a time in front of it as they would a Windows machine.

In other words, I doubt support costs are going to be raised significantly in the long run by selling machines with Linux on them.

Posted by: Damon K   Posted on: 11/14/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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