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The Perfect Sysadmin Workstation: A Mac
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For the way I work, multi-head Linux beats the tar out of OSX:
- Spaces is broken for my purposes. I like to have independent multi-head. Having a terminal window open on desktop 1 and flipping virtual desktops between Fullscreen RDP sessions on Desktop 0 without losing my terminal window, for instance.
- iTunes is a draw for a Sysadmin desktop? Nope. Firstly, personally, I despise iTunes and can't wait for native Amarok. But that argument has no place in an article about OSX being an admin platform.
- Leopard is broken in fundamental ways that annoy me as a Unix admin (for instance, X11 is broken enough that the X11 team suggests downgrading [no multi-head support at all, does not respect the menu bar])
- Auto-focus/Auto-raise. This is an unfixable issue, and I'm used to it on OSX now, but you can never have auto-raise since it would change the current app in the menu bar every time you mouse over anything. Leopard almost fixes this by having Mouse Focus Follows Mouse. If they had Keyboard Focus Follows Mouse too, that would be swell.
- My laptop fails to wake "quickly" ever, and fails to wake (requiring a restart) often enough to annoy me. This was not a problem with SuSE on my old HP laptop, ever.
- "It just works" indicates someone who's not used to having 10 to 12 month uptimes on their workstations. I can't remember the last time Konqueror crashed on me (in Linux. In Apple's X11, X apps crash all the time), compared to Finder... . Probably once a month my Mac Pro will fail to unlock and must be hard-reset.
There are many positives:
- Mail is good. A mail app is not that convincing though. I think this is because one of my term-serv sessions was to a windows desktop for the sole purpose of running Outlook
- As useless as Spaces is to me, that's exactly how useful Expose is to me. I'm reasonably certain someone has duplicated this for K, but I'm just as certain it's not going to be as slick.
- It's nice to be able to drag apps between monitors. This is a function of how I used X11 ("real" multihead instead of Xinerama). If I wasn't so hung up on flipping desktops independently, I could have had that on Linux. Apple should be able to figure out a way to enable dragging between heads, while keeping them independent for Spaces flipping. That would rock.
Independent Docks and Menu Bar's depending on which monitor you're on would be nice too. I find it kind of ridiculous that in a multi-monitor setup you have to travel all the way back to the first screen to get to menus.
None of my complaints are a deal-breaker, and I do like and use OSX, but in an admin setting, running a lot of stuff in a large enterprise, Linux + lots of video cards gets my vote for "ease of use" and "sick uptimes".
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In general, most of what you said can apply to linux. Add to that the fact that linux runs on older and cheaper hardware...
It's hard to use your justifications to select OS X
You want "spaces". Linux has had virtual desktops for years.
You want Mail? Kmail is the program they started with in order to create Mail.
I really didn't see anything that screamed "yes...definitely a reason to switch" and "It looks nicer" just doesn't cut it.
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If you're a sysadmin, then you probably have a clue about how to use computers. That means that Linux and Mac OS X are at best equally well suited. If it is an ALL OS X network or devices, then maybe it makes sense to use OS X. In a mixed environment of Windows, Linux, and/or OS X I think that Linux wins.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Saturday November 10, @03:26AM (#120698)
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To me, a good reliable laptop is the ultimate Admin tool.
It's not about features to me. I know I can run everything I need on either Linux or OS X. The reason I choose a Mac is because power management is up there with the best. I've never been able to configure any Linux laptop to be as good and reliable as a Mac when it comes to running off of the battery, nor have I seen anyone else able to either.
Connectivity is also important. Linux balks on some wireless networks. Mac has them beat out of the box.
I work for a research foundation at a major hospital in one of the major cities in the US. There's a total of 15 sys admins who work with me. We're all given the freedom to use what we want as our personal computer. All of us use MacBook Pros.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Saturday November 10, @07:26AM (#120699)
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I have to agree. As an admin who administers UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Macs, Macs give me the greatest flexibility with Windows boxes being the least flexible.
Personally my favorites have been Solaris and Mac OS X. I used to use a lot of Linux before but after fighting to get some hardware to play nice we have moved a lot of our Linux servers to OS X.
The OS X boxes do everything we need that the Linux boxes did (file sharing, LDAP, DHCP, DNS, etc) but getting file sharing and LDAP working with Kerberos authentication is a snap on OS X compared to Linux. OS X proven to be more reliable with our managing and sharing our SAN storage pools as well. And we no longer need a full time IT admin to manage it all.
Client side was also made much easier when we moved from Windows boxes to Macs. Switching the Windows boxes to Linux would have been one solution but going Mac made single sign-on a snap and since we are a studio we needed to run Photoshop and such that just are not available for Linux, and no gimp does not compare.
OS X server and client have proven to be the simplest and most reliable solution for us.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday November 21, @01:47PM (#120838)
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I have both Terminal and iTerm, SSH, and ScreenSharing (built in VNC that allows resizing/scaling the screen to fit mine) all of which let me connect and administer any number of systems around the world. And I do.
What is your problem?
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Sunday September 07, @05:49AM (#122469)
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