What Does Microsoft Windows Really Cost ???
With the recent upsurge of popularity in Linux based systems, IT admins have been asking the question of the TRUE cost of Linux. What impact does it have on the enterprise in regard to training, support, etc? While some claim that the cost of Linux is fattened by a little extra user training (a claim I happen to disagree with), what about the extra administration and maintenance that has to be done on Windows systems?
The general rule of thumb about computer security is that software is inherently insecure and will require updates. While Windows does keep a good handle on things with Windows Update, a few caveats exist. First off, Microsoft has been notoriously slow at providing security updates to certain critical vulnerabilities over the past few years. Secondly, Windows Update only updates software provided by Microsoft, namely Windows and Office. Third, several very severe security vulnerabilities in the core of Windows operations that have yet to be addressed, such as the “net user” command. On the flipside, most mainstream variants of GNU/Linux feature an advanced package manager that takes care of software updates for every peice of software installed by the package manager in a single process. In my experience, the best package managers that provide the most software belong to Ubuntu and Gentoo. Debian/Ubuntu’s apt may be preferable to more people because of its speed and simplicity but Gentoo’s Portage offers more code and build customizability than any other package manager and features more packages than most package managers. Because of the centralization of application administration, updates to all packages on a system can be easily scheduled and administrative overhead eliminated.
I’ve seen several computer-literate people have the misconception that package management is difficult and they’d rather do it the Windows way and download their software from whatever website they like the best and trust that its valid software and is free of malware. I have experience with this type of program administration and I can faithfully say its flawed. I’ve downloaded software on a Windows machine from so called trusted websites and gotten various forms of adware and spyware and I don’t like the paradigm. Linux package managers on the other hand are closely guarded and administered with verification mechanisms in place to counteract a bad seed administrator. Ubuntu’s apt repositories use message digests to verify that the other repositories are using the correct version/copy of the package. This discourages disgruntled server administrators or malicious hackers from placing a bogus package in the repository that may contain viruses. Package management is truly one of the greatest innovations to ever come to computing.
I go to school at a technology center for IT studies and the class has to take care of the school’s IT maintenance needs. Just today, we did a full cleanup schedule on all the pcs in the school. The process took the entire class (25 people) all day to complete and not all the school’s 250 PCs were completed. It occurred to me that running anti virus/spyware, registry cleaners, disk cleanup utilities, and defrag consume far too much maintenance time. For an IT department to spend this much time completing a task is beyond me. Sure, some of the tasks can be scheduled to complete automatically but they still need to be verified and the task has to be scheduled to begin with. How much time does the average IT department spend taking care of weekly or bi-weekly maintenance on Windows machines? Do IT departments even bother with it? If not, what about the risk of malware infections?
I abhor having to do this maintenance at school, mainly because I NEVER have to perform it at home. At home, I use nothing but Linux based systems. I have been using some form of Linux as my operating system for nearly 10 years now (fully ditched Windows about 5 years back) and I’ve never had a virus. I’ve never had spyware. Linux filesystems don’t get nearly as fragmented as NTFS and I’ve never defragged a Linux box. It seems to me that all this talk about the true cost of Linux is taking the spotlight while no one is really asking about the cost of Windows. Not only are the licenses grossly overpriced but the cost of properly maintaining a working system wastes valuable time for the IT department. While they’re taking care of these annoying little tasks, something more important has to wait in the wings. I’d like to hear some IT managers’ positions on this and see how much time they spend maintaining Windows systems in their enterprise.