Most servers around the world run Linux. The same goes for almost all supercomputers. That’s astonishing in a capitalist world where absolutely everything is commodified. Why can’t these big tech companies manage to sell their own software to server operators or supercomputers? Why is an open, free project that is free for users so superior here?
Linux is maintained by large companies
Linux offers near-endless customisation and Kernel is also open sourced for any kind of (performance) tweaks.
Moreover, Linux is, by design, better suited to be a server OS than desktop OS.
These are the same reasons why most of the web servers across world runs on Linux based distros.
I’m going to contest you on one point. Linux is well suited as a server OS for all kinds of reasons, true, but it is absolutely just as well suited as a desktop OS. Even for (maybe especially for?) the masses. I consider any thinking otherwise as dated at this point. Arguably only MacOS is slightly better and it’s essentially a 'nix derivative with it’s own quirks.
To which my first thought is: who cares, because almost no normies are buying desktop computers any more. I say that as a desktop OS user.
It’s not a popular observation around here but the facts are stubborn. I so wish we nerds would wake up, put our own personal experience aside, and concentrate our energies on how to bring FOSS to the mobile platform. Going forwards, it’s all that will count. It’s already all that counts.
Mobile is not all that counts. I don’t know anyone without at least one laptop or desktop in the house (typically more) and gamers alone contribute more billions of $$ to entertainment than sports and movies combined. There’s hundreds of millions of normal people who are still using MicroSlop Windows which has turned into a surveilance nightmare almost as bad as mobile platforms simply because it’s the lowest effort/barrier to entry (pre-installed).
I absolutely want to concentrate energy on FOSS on mobile - with you there, but Steam Proton has made gaming so simple on Linux and the last 10 years of quality of life OS/Kernel improvements means FOSS can already compete on “desktop” and win. I"m saying don’t dismiss it because if you can prove to people they can have a bulletproof and seemless experience for FREE without having to pay subscriptions and get privacy in the deal, they are more apt to consider a Linux phone (assuming it works).
P.S. I should also mention that most everything we improve or build for desktop Linux can be used on mobile (within mobile plat limitations). Win hearts and minds where you can - Linux isn’t just for servers.
Alright! I’m with you! Where do we start? I’m serious!
Buy a Linux phone: pinephone, librem, jolla. Then developers will build apps for the platform
Which one do you personally own? Do you recommend it?
Edit: I see that Jolla is in a preorder state.
Microsoft tried to make Windows Server popular. Apple sold a server OS and even its own rack-mount servers for a while.
The people using servers, and often the people making the decisions about what to use have a high degree of technical knowledge and skill. The things that drive popularity in consumer operating systems such as being preloaded on devices and having a polished GUI don’t have as big an influence on experts.
Customizability, reliability, and performance do have a big influence on what experts choose, and Linux wins on those points. There’s also the history of proprietary Unix being big in the server/supercomputer market, and Linux is an obvious successor.
30 year IT Professional here…
^ That guy gets it
Ok. You seem to understand the basic concept I’ve been screaming for years. That is that not all users are the same.
I’ve been saying for a while that linux doesn’t face a usability issue. It faces an image issue.
I know a friend who will not even LOOK at Linux, because she asked me “how do I install software?”. I answered that there’s two ways. The first is going to a software manager, and using that to download the program. Just like googles app store on android. If it’s not there, you type sudo apt install (program).
The second I mentioned that second part, she said “Ohhhh no no no no no. I won’t remember all that…”
For her the software manager is going to be the absolute best way. HOWEVER, the image of linux is that it’s only for tech gurus who can navigate terminal.
So she has a point here. Yes, there are alternative ways to do things, but for people, it’s all about image. Just look at Coke ads. There’s nothing special about them. Red can, white classic logo, maybe a polar bear or santa during the holidays. But it works because of image.
So, my question is, why doesn’t linux collectively NOT DISABLE terminal, but instead de-escalate the prominance on which the platform is defined. Why not make it in image closer to what cmd prompts in windows are?
If you search “how to _____ in windows 10”, you’ll get a tutorial with photos, and step by step in how to solve your issue, using only the mouse. Almost 100% of the time.
But if you search “how to ____ in (distro of choice)” you’ll be given a tutorial almost 100% of the time in terminal commands.
If you “get” terminal, you’ll understand the errors. I’ve tried using terminal off and on for about 17 years now. I have a 0% succsess rate of it doing the thing it needs to do. I’m sure these errors are simple. If I knew what it was telling me, I’m sure theres probably an easy fix.
But a good example is, there was some program I wanted. Its not in my software center. In order to run it, I need something called “python3”. I attempt sudo apt install python3. I get a message saying python3 is already installed. I try to install the program. Program says prerequisit python3 needs to be installed. I sudo apt install python3. Python3 is already installed. Sudo apt update python3. Python3 is already latest version. Try to install the program. Still doesn’t think python3 is installed.
I don’t know how to fix that. I don’t even know what python3 is. That was 4 years ago. I don’t even remember what program I was trying to install. I just remember it was during the days I was recovering from cancer, so for 3 months, all day every day I tried to solve it.
I never solved it.
So, why can YOU easily see that normal every day users use these machines differently than experts, with different needs?
Just make the IMAGE of Linux easy enough for toddlers. 12 years ago my 2 year old niece was using an iPad. Even today her dad says she’d never understand Linux. She could…if she tried it. Because a lot of distros function user friendly. But it has that image problem. And until Linux becomes mainstream, the software will never be 1:1. It will be “gimp vs photoshop”. And as long as thats the case, usability isn’t 100% for normies. Theres still tons of rough edges. And those rough edges become easily solved through terminal. And now we’re back to the image problem.
Why don’t the distro makers get this?
The terminal is the common denominator between different desktop environments, and between distros for many things. It’s hard to get away from that.
You’d have to make one video for each DE and then update it every time the UI is updated.
I can relate to being intimidated by any instructions that mention the terminal. When I first started with Linux I would prefer doing stuff using a GUI over command line.
I started getting into hobbyist coding stuff, and fifteen years later I’m much more comfortable with the terminal.
Even so, I think trying to make Linux more palatable for the average person is going to be tough. It’s very difficult to make something that’s powerful and extensible while also being easy to use.
Nah, it’s actually really easy to make something powerful, intuitive, extensible, and easy to use.
It’s stopping the idiots from punching themselves in the dick and blaming you for it that’s hard.
You’re one of the people who would rather watch a 13 minute YouTube video than read a paragraph.
He says, as he replies to someone who just spent 30 minutes typing out a 14 paragraph message on a cellphone with no physical buttons.
To be a bit less flippant, the analogy isn’t far off.
Reading terminal instructions that you can easily copy/paste is a hell of a lot easier than watching a video and clicking around menus.
The issues that you’re having wouldn’t be any easier if they showed in a GUI. Yeah, things with GUI can be more polished, but that’s a result of the effort in that product, and not a result.of the GUI.
I sympathize with what I believe is your main point, that Linux people often are condescending and refuse to make things user friendly, whether that’s in a GUI or in the terminal. But the terminal itself shouldn’t be too daunting.
Ain’t nobody reading that novel past “sudo apt install”, least of all OPs girlfriend from Canada there.
It’s ok. Literacy isn’t for everyone.
In Linux’ defense, Python’s mess is its own problem.
apt was mentioned, so this might actually be Debian’s problem. Python doesn’t support being installed without its standard library, but (unless they’ve decided to stop being dumb since I last checked) Debian’s python package only contains part of the standard library, and the rest is split into other optional packages. If you find software that says its only dependency is python, on Debian-derived distros, it might not work without installing extra packages, and if the software’s maintainer doesn’t use Debian and know about this, then their installation instructions won’t cover it.
Ahhh that would actually explain a few issues I’ve had trying to use Python based automation tools on Proxmox. lol Weird packages missing…
That is a peculiar way to shoot themselves in the foot.
A big piece is licensing. When you’re throwing hundreds or thousands of processor cores into a data center, somewhere a Microsoft VAR is just drooling to sell you datacenter license packs that you’ll need to renew/repurchase for every major OS upgrade. Ah, and you’ll need device/user cals. Oh you want to manage it too? Oof.
As a developer, I actively avoid anything that requires managing licenses. It’s a pain in the ass and if there’s a decent alternative, I’ll take it. It’s also annoying when something needs to be scaled out to handle the load, but I can’t because we don’t have enough licenses. Since I’m not paying for it anyway, it’s not the price I care about, but the software freedom.
Just to really drive this point home, if I go and price out a dell R470 with the default config from dell.ca it’s $9700. If i want a windows server license, that’s another $4700 on top of that.
Why pay 50% more for software that is slower and harder to support? That’s not even thinking about SQL server licensing which is even more expensive.
Almost anyone buying servers already has Microsoft enterprise agreement licenses, which are much cheaper than that retail price.
This is true, but as I recall the minimum users you need to get an enterprise agreement license is ~500 users. So you’re already talking over 6 figures to have the option to buy cheaper server OS licenses.
Maybe I’m misremembering the name, it’s been a while. I remember the minimum volume license purchase was five licenses, but you could buy one Windows server license at whatever price, and four $5 whatever licenses.
I must admit, I’ve been too far removed from the volume licensing to remember how it worked. It was definitely cheaper than retail and I remember 2016 and beyond you paid by 2 physical cores each, at least for datacenter.
All I recall was that they changed the licensing terms twice in ~5 years, and the forced minimum of ~500 users for enterprise put one of my past employers into a bind.
I would not be surprised if they had changed it once or twice since.
They’ve dropped physical cpu licensing model and now you pay per vCPU/thread (unless they’ve changed it again). People would buy a host with 128 cores and use virtualization to cram it into one physical CPU. You’re not wrong that there’s enterprise packages to pay way less, but it’s still a nightmare and if you get audited you’re guaranteed to have to pay up some extra $ since nobody gets it right.
Even the microsoft VARs can’t make sense of it. A previous job (service provider) got audited 2 months after I left and it sounded like a total headache.
That was in 2018 or so, but I’m sure there’s something similar now. If they haven’t forced everyone to subscription licenses, that is.
You’re likely thinking of CALs, and one is required for each person accessing the server. Licensing turns into a nightmare very quickly.
Almost anyone buying servers already has Microsoft enterprise agreement licenses, which are much cheaper than that retail price.
Right. But Linux is… checks notes… free.
Enterprise Linux however is not. The majority of places won’t buy anything without support. Which is why I sell a lot of Red Hat.
most enterprises who need the kind of scale that a Microsoft enterprise agreement even makes sense are paying just as much for Redhat or similar.
“free” is not really a consideration in the selection.
I worked for a mid size distribution center and just the licensing fees for all types of software for about 500 workers was $100k a month. Just basic warehouse management, erp, Microsoft, etc. Let alone data center licensing.
Because those engineers were free to create the value that they needed and only the value that they needed. Windows Server and OSX Server were/are not unfettered. They, therefore could not offer a better value.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV0a-b_VhBg
Google and Amazon are competing with their own Linux OSes. Even IBM bought 30% of RedHat almost 30 years ago. Windows is developing their own Linux OS now too, Azure Linux. Windows Server is down to 40% in their cloud Azure environment. I’m just guessing that’s because many long term contracts are ending and the companies associated have been migrating away from Windows Server. Hence the need for Azure Linux. OSX server flopped big time twenty years ago. Apple had to shutdown their entire XServe division. You don’t always have to sell the software or OS to make money off of it. Especially when there is heavy competition. It’s like restaurants in the US giving away free tap water when you sit down to eat. There are a lot of ways to compete for dollars in a capitalist world.
/u/Zak did a pretty good job summing it up.
These servers are hosting custom software. The devs can develop for any hardware and OS combination. So the choice is largely performance, features, and price. Free is the best price in a capitalist world. Free isn’t the only price though, companies are just fine spending money if they are getting a better value. They just aren’t with Windows Server and didn’t with OSX server, they don’t offer a better value. They aren’t more performant and they don’t offer any features that make it worth the money or risking vendor lock-in. With Linux, if the value you need isn’t there, anyone is free to create the value that is needed, with zero limitations. And they only need create the value they need.
It’s like restaurants in the US giving away free tap water when you sit down to eat.
This is a bad example because in many states they’re required to offer free tap water by law.
Really? Which states? Pretty sure there are no state or federal laws. County maybe? I do know in California, it’s a state law that restaurant customers must first request the water, before they can be provide the free tap water. I think it’s just a misnomer that some states require free tap water for customers.
Microsoft comes out with Windows Supercomputer Pro.
They sell 6 copies.
When you’re running exotic hardware, everything is custom. Linux is the most easily customizable.
Most servers do not need a fancy user interface. They don’t have monitors attached to them. Most of the other OSes you listed come bundled with a ton of user experience software along with the expectation a human will directly interact with them.
Servers are typically deployed and managed with automation, by the thousands. Lean. Simple. Secure. Tuned for their specific purpose. This is a lot easier to do with Linux than an all purpose general use personal computing platform.
Hey now, I set all my servers admin passwords to my external IP address. Lean, simple… uh easy to find
One thing I’m not seeing mentioned is Windows forces restarts and updates, which admins really don’t want to have servers interrupted by, at intervals of Microsoft’s choosing. With Linux you choose 100% of the restart and update times.
This is an old take. Modern Linux management includes plenty of restarts and updates. Sometimes just as many as windows, especially with modern enterprises plugging heavy kennel-space agents into their Linux images.
Both ecosystems have adapted to the routine reboot annoyances, so it’s no longer a real differentiator.
Modern Linux management includes plenty of restarts
Maybe if you run a dogwater distro. Try Debian
That’s not really how Windows servers work. Most large enterprises are likely going to be using WSUS or other patch management for updates where you can choose exactly which patches you want and when to do them. Those updates do almost always require reboots, but again you can schedule those reboots at a time of your choosing.
Even without WSUS, you can disable automatic updates and reboots. Plenty of Windows servers sitting there unpatched with uptime in years.
For sure, I honestly just added that bit so it would sound like i knew what i was talking about at least a little bit.
Also the idea of a windows server having an uptime in years gives me chills in a bad way.
They hopefully mostly sit inside an unexposed subnet and aren’t reachable from the internet, but I’ve seen several companies running their public facing production applications on an unpatched EOLed Windows that hasn’t been rebooted in years because the person who set it up no longer works there and they’re afraid to find out what one time scripts he ran to get the system running without setting up any persistence.
Most servers around the world run Linux.
True.
Why can’t these big tech companies manage to sell their own software to server operators
Lots of companies large and small are running commercial distributions of Linux including with paid licensing for products Like RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) or SUSE. Millions of other servers are on co-branded versions of Linux that are provided for free to the customer as long as the customer continues to use the company’s service. Examples here are Amazon Linux or Oracle Linux (both of which you’re only allowed to run if they’re operating on Amazon or Oracle Cloud servers. Now, these same companies likely also use unlicensed free Linux in places, either disposable clusters or labs, but if an application has commercial uptime requirements (meaning downtime costs money), few companies run free Linux in those specific applications.
or supercomputers?
This is a frighteningly small install base to try to sell a commercial operating system on. How many supercomputers are there in the world? Perhaps 1000? Moreover, these are such specialized set ups that trying to make a one-size-fits-all OS is likely impossible.
Why is an open, free project that is free for users so superior here?
Just because there is free Linux does not mean that all Linux servers in the world are free.
I’m pretty sure you can run Oracle Linux on bare metal? But it only makes sense if you plan to run Oracle software on it (they only support enterprise distros like Oracle Linux, RHEL, or SLES) or want to use Ksplice to patch the kernel without rebooting.
I’m pretty sure you can run Oracle Linux on bare metal?
Yep, you’re exactly right. I was incorrect on that. I’d never looked at trying to license it on bare metal (or for use in another Cloud provider), but I looked it up and found you’re correct! I had assumed it was following the same licensing model as AWS does with Amazon Linux.
Nobody runs AWS in their data center, but lots of people have a humongous and ancient oracle database or two running. Oracle Linux was forked from RHEL in the mid 2000s for this use-case.
I never had any interest in it because it didn’t make sense to run Oracle Linux for the DB and some other distro on everything else, so we went with a more mainstream enterprise distro we could use for everything.
After they acquired Ksplice and ruined it for everyone else they have a better value proposition for it, since now they’re the only ones who can patch kernel vulnerabilities without rebooting.
Nobody runs AWS in their data center,
Well, that’s exactly what the AWS Outpost product does. Oracle has the same type of product for OCI called Cloud@Customer. This is on-prem equipment that runs the cloud vendor’s hypervisor along with integration into CSP.
Oracle Linux was forked from RHEL in the mid 2000s for this use-case.
While you’re right about its origins, and options for bare metal use, in addition to that Oracle has evolved it to be their “free but supported” enterprise grade Linux for VMs running in OCI, just as AWS does with Amazon Linux.
I never had any interest in it because it didn’t make sense to run Oracle Linux for the DB and some other distro on everything else, so we went with a more mainstream enterprise distro we could use for everything.
I completely agree with your approach for on-prem deployments. However, for OCI VMs its a compelling case to use Oracle Linux when there’s no licensing costs compared to RHEL or SLES while still being an Enterprise supported OS.
It just works better.
But that raises the question: why can’t tech companies, with all their billions, manage to produce software that is at least on a par with Linux?
Linux is made by tens of thousands of experts who care about what they’re making. No amount of money could hire that amount of expertise, herd that many cats, or elicit that much passion.
Those companies are the ones paying for Linux development. Thirty plus years of companies developing and improving Linux. Most have their own Linux OS. IBM owns 30% of RedHat. Linux hasn’t been a hobbyist OS since the early nineties.
They could, if they wanted to. This is somewhat an example of “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”.
A lot of that is the fact that Linux is run incredibly lean. Replicating that isn’t cheap. They absolutely can, but since Linux is free and they can even modify it to suit their needs, its far simpler to do that.
Android is the best example. Google wanted a phone OS, so they bought Android Inc, who was making one. They could’ve spun up their own with their own talent, hired more, etc, but just absorbed one instead. That talent was making a phone OS based on Linux, because, again, they could’ve delved into the details of OS creation, but it was far easier to take a free OS, change the bits you want changed (like adding touchscreen support, which to my knowledge, wasn’t in the Linux version Android started with), and run with the new version you’ve made.
It’s also worth pointing out that Google has spent a lot of money on Android, and other large companies spend a lot on developing their own custom Linux Distro. It’s not like they have one software engineer for Android who downloaded Linux once and changed it. These companies are willing to do what you describe, they just didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. The Linux kernel, thanks to the community behind it, is incredibly secure and efficient, and there just wasn’t any reason to change it or copy it when it exists and is free to use.
They could but why, Linux is free. If companies pay an enterprise fee it’s to have a support contract to be able to escalate critical bugs but it’s not necessary.
Those companies have incentives to maximize profit, not maximize efficiency. In particular Microsoft has relentlessly given developers the opposite of what they want because its more profitable to some decision maker within Microsoft. Its enshitification.
Both Microsoft and Amazon have their own flavor of Linux now, but that’s really only for use in AWS and azure - and no one really uses either much yet
Because the decision makers at the top aren’t targeting long term goals of a good quality product and instead are focused on short term goals of increasing profit.
Linux has an extremely flexible architecture. Before Linux, most servers ran on UNIX, and before that, well, networking was in a very early and rudimentary stage.
When UNIX licensing shenanigans kept happening, Linux was a more and more attractive option as it matured.
Today, Linux is an incredibly flexible, reliable and performant OS. It’s free, in most cases. Why would anyone use anything else? HPC software all runs on Linux and UNIX. You can run it on a tiny little SBC like a raspberry pi, you can run it in an embedded system like car infotainment or a smart meter, and you can run it on ultra high-performance supercomputer clusters. It doesn’t give a damn; it just works.
Why would we use anything else? Apple’s ecosystem, while great, makes no sense in the server world. They have their own unique directory service that nobody wants to support (unless they’re trying to sell something to Apple themselves), they have total control over the OS and its capabilities, and it’s technically illegal to modify. Windows has a heavy GUI, and its command-line interface is middling at best and difficult to learn. Windows excels in backwards compatibility and ease of deployment, which makes it ideal for small and medium businesses, but it quickly becomes irrelevant once you scale to a certain point. This is why they’ve got their Azure AD product, for example. It’s attempting to fix the scalability issues with Windows Server. Having spoken to some of the developers of Windows Server, it’s also plain as day that Microsoft is only really maintaining Windows Server to collect on their existing contracts. They have no desire to grow that part of their business.
With all of this in mind, Linux the most obvious choice. It takes no time at all to slap a copy of Ubuntu Server on a pizza box and have a functioning server up in an hour. Everything else is more complex, slower, and costs money.
I want to add; MS actively discourages running Windows Server with a GUI. It’s meant to be headless and managed by PowerShell.
Which IME almost no one does. If you’re already going to be interacting with a server solely through a CLI, why not just use Linux on the first place.
Sometimes you’re stuck running IIS or SQL Server or the like. Can’t think of anything personal I’d have to run on Windows Server, but commercial is another world. In any case, I always ran headless given the option.
Amazon’s and Google’s OSes already are Linux variants. The thing that makes Android is the GUI userland, not the underlying system which is just Linux with a libc implementation not by GNU.
And MacOS is a BSD variant, so also Unix-like under the hood. So Microsoft is the only real black sheep in that ecosystem.
Apple stopped using macOS for apple.com a long time ago. They switched to Linux. If Apple don’t use their own OS in a server environment, why would full blown supercomputers?
TIL
You answered your own question:
That’s astonishing in a capitalist world where absolutely everything is commodified.
If you bought windows for the hundred or so servers you manage how much is that going to cost you up front and then again every time Microsoft decides to just end support and roll out a new OS? How much work does it take to manage those licenses and make those updates? And what are you getting in return for that additional expense?
Us oldsters remember the UNIX wars. There were a number of different flavours of UNIX fighting for commercial domination. In the end they all failed because of fragmentation. This is why Linux won.
It works well, has little to no vendor lock in, and has reasonable or no licensing costs.
Also drivers can be developed without needing anyones permission or validation like with Windows drivers.
You can develop drivers on Windows all on your own too, you just have to disable driver signing.
Linux has something similar now with secureboot. If you have your own kernel module, you have to load your signing key to the UEFI thing.
