Fundamental Difference in the Mindset for Updates of Linux vs. Windows Admins
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@gjacobse said:
The same software doesn't support Windows 10 yet. So they can not move forward - even with the seven computers they bought this year alone as Win10 cripples them It has to be Win7 or 8/8.1
This begs a separate, but also important question. Why is it so commonly considered acceptable in the Windows world to become beholden to software that is either not supported or poorly supported? Being a little slow on updates, sure, that's acceptable. But being many generations behind without keeping the software updated? In any ecosystem outside of Windows, this would be considered not business ready and abandoned. Just look at Elastix, they fell nearly two generations (rather than four) behind and even with one product bridging the gap to some degree and a fully updated one in the works, many people considered it to be totally abandoned because they hit two versions without supporting the current OS!
The non-Windows world views embracing their platform as wildly more important than the Windows one does. What is not just tolerated but totally excused and often embraced on Windows would be met with ridicule and totally removal on another platform.
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@gjacobse said:
In the regard of licenses it doesn't. It's the physical ability to use the add-ons and such.
But the license is the sole different between Office 2013 and Office 365.
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How much is chicken and egg. My guess is that a distrust and lack of embracing of Windows leads to an allowance for third party software that also does not embrace it. Once you don't feel that patching or staying up to date matter, you are very likely to not care when you buy software that doesn't stay up to date either and then the cycle begins to support itself with everything going more and more out of date and soon you are running DOS on 486 hardware to support something that no one really considered how to maintain long term reliably.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Why is it so commonly considered acceptable in the Windows world to become beholden to software that is either not supported or poorly supported?
I'm guessing sunk cost. They paid for it, and now it's unsupported so they are either going to have to spend more money on another solution or just not pay anything and stay where they are.
The hospital I interviewed at was using full desktops pretty much as thin clients and they were still on XP. If I remember right they had issues with some part of their EMR or something on 10, so they weren't going to update to that. But they would have to pay for 7 or 8.1.
Obviously this would have been mitigated by not using a thick client with a full OS as a thin client, but I wouldn't be surprised if the director got a kickback for doing that.
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I guess Windows admins simply don't have the balls to deal with potential problems that supposedly can arise from patching and upgrading Windows systems. I keep hearing that Microsoft usually breaks things with another Windows Update cycle, yet besides single Outlook 2010 issue a month or 2 ago, I have never run into issues with patching.
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@johnhooks said:
I'm guessing sunk cost. They paid for it, and now it's unsupported so they are either going to have to spend more money on another solution or just not pay anything and stay where they are.
That's a great point, and another one that I don't understand. So often the same "group" of people that I see that distrust Windows and Microsoft, but feel that they absolutely must use it, also feel at the onset of any purchase that vendor support is so critical that they must choose Windows for this reason (a bad one since it doesn't come with any support, that's a common SMB myth) and yet they then willy nilly abandon support when it is most needed (as the product ages.) What makes support so important at one point that it drives a huge amount of decision making yet then matters so little that it is casually discarded?
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@marcinozga said:
I guess Windows admins simply don't have the balls to deal with potential problems that supposedly can arise from patching and upgrading Windows systems. I keep hearing that Microsoft usually breaks things with another Windows Update cycle, yet besides single Outlook 2010 issue a month or 2 ago, I have never run into issues with patching.
They did have a bad one in like 2014 where WSUS broke everything IIRC. But that's just one.
It's probably the crap software they buy from some junk vendor that was written in FoxPro that gets screwed up from an update.
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@marcinozga said:
I guess Windows admins simply don't have the balls to deal with potential problems that supposedly can arise from patching and upgrading Windows systems. I keep hearing that Microsoft usually breaks things with another Windows Update cycle, yet besides single Outlook 2010 issue a month or 2 ago, I have never run into issues with patching.
Nor have I, and I've never seen a hard core enterprise Windows shop shy from patching in any way. Although I have seen them fall a decade or more behind on major updates.
I hear horror stories of updates going awry, but I have never witnessed it first hand.
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@scottalanmiller said:
What makes support so important at one point that it drives a huge amount of decision making yet then matters so little that it is casually discarded?
Because they learned "that system" and don't want to learn another one.
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@johnhooks said:
They did have a bad one in like 2014 where WSUS broke everything IIRC. But that's just one.
I've seen lots of WSUS problems, but not update ones.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
They did have a bad one in like 2014 where WSUS broke everything IIRC. But that's just one.
I've seen lots of WSUS problems, but not update ones.
Ah I remember what it was. When the update was sent out, it broke the ability to update from WSUS after that.
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@johnhooks said:
Ah I remember what it was. When the update was sent out, it broke the ability to update from WSUS after that.
Yeah, WSUS seems like a piece of crap. So many problems caused by WSUS. I totally appreciate the goals of it, we do this all the time in the Linux world, but it is just so poorly done. I'm dealing with an environment with it right now and my first question "can't we just remove WSUS and have that fix all the problems?" WSUS generally solves nothing in the SMB but introduces a lot of cost, complexity and problems of its own. It's just extra fragility often there for no purpose other than to intentionally disrupt rapid patching.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Ah I remember what it was. When the update was sent out, it broke the ability to update from WSUS after that.
Yeah, WSUS seems like a piece of crap. So many problems caused by WSUS. I totally appreciate the goals of it, we do this all the time in the Linux world, but it is just so poorly done. I'm dealing with an environment with it right now and my first question "can't we just remove WSUS and have that fix all the problems?" WSUS generally solves nothing in the SMB but introduces a lot of cost, complexity and problems of its own. It's just extra fragility often there for no purpose other than to intentionally disrupt rapid patching.
Thankfully I've never had to use it. I've just heard of the issues with it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Ah I remember what it was. When the update was sent out, it broke the ability to update from WSUS after that.
Yeah, WSUS seems like a piece of crap. So many problems caused by WSUS. I totally appreciate the goals of it, we do this all the time in the Linux world, but it is just so poorly done. I'm dealing with an environment with it right now and my first question "can't we just remove WSUS and have that fix all the problems?" WSUS generally solves nothing in the SMB but introduces a lot of cost, complexity and problems of its own. It's just extra fragility often there for no purpose other than to intentionally disrupt rapid patching.
I use it for the purpose of rapid patching. And I am aware of the issues with it, but it's nothing major that can't be easily fixed.
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I'm always happy to see updates, but having been burned I am cautious about how / when I apply them. Usually within 7 days of their release I'll do it over a weekend. Typically that's enough time for some other sucker to blow up his junk with a bad update and bleat about it on tech news.
As to new OS my primary concern (and a primary part of my job description) is keeping things running smoothly. New OS means user training and while a majority are excited to get new kit and have a go with it there is a minority that unleash FUD and prattle on about how it impacts their productivity. This can rattle up the chain and really impact my relationship with the business. I do not deploy a new OS lightly for this reason.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Ah I remember what it was. When the update was sent out, it broke the ability to update from WSUS after that.
Yeah, WSUS seems like a piece of crap. So many problems caused by WSUS. I totally appreciate the goals of it, we do this all the time in the Linux world, but it is just so poorly done. I'm dealing with an environment with it right now and my first question "can't we just remove WSUS and have that fix all the problems?" WSUS generally solves nothing in the SMB but introduces a lot of cost, complexity and problems of its own. It's just extra fragility often there for no purpose other than to intentionally disrupt rapid patching.
WSUS is a piece of crap but with limited bandwidth I'd much rather download them all once. Kinda screwed up to think about but WSUS might be one of the worst pieces of software I use on a regular basis.
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@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Why is it so commonly considered acceptable in the Windows world to become beholden to software that is either not supported or poorly supported?
I'm guessing sunk cost. They paid for it, and now it's unsupported so they are either going to have to spend more money on another solution or just not pay anything and stay where they are.
The hospital I interviewed at was using full desktops pretty much as thin clients and they were still on XP. If I remember right they had issues with some part of their EMR or something on 10, so they weren't going to update to that. But they would have to pay for 7 or 8.1.
Obviously this would have been mitigated by not using a thick client with a full OS as a thin client, but I wouldn't be surprised if the director got a kickback for doing that.
The kick back seems less likely (though possible). To me it seems like the organic nature of migrations lead to this situation. They already had PCs deployed for old app. They deployed a new app that used TS. TS could be run from the existing PCs, so there would be no cost involved at the end user side. So why spend money when you don't have to?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
I'm guessing sunk cost. They paid for it, and now it's unsupported so they are either going to have to spend more money on another solution or just not pay anything and stay where they are.
That's a great point, and another one that I don't understand. So often the same "group" of people that I see that distrust Windows and Microsoft, but feel that they absolutely must use it, also feel at the onset of any purchase that vendor support is so critical that they must choose Windows for this reason (a bad one since it doesn't come with any support, that's a common SMB myth) and yet they then willy nilly abandon support when it is most needed (as the product ages.) What makes support so important at one point that it drives a huge amount of decision making yet then matters so little that it is casually discarded?
I'm not sure it's about support. Instead to me it's the default - the tyranny of the default. It's what those people know. It's like, why do they hire people with degrees over people without? because it's an old mind set that's difficult at best to show is wrong.
Additionally, it's probably the tool set available. Of course this shows there are all kinds of other problems, but let's a young company starts up and they are looking for a tool for their company and they are sold on a windows one. and now they are stuck.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Ah I remember what it was. When the update was sent out, it broke the ability to update from WSUS after that.
Yeah, WSUS seems like a piece of crap. So many problems caused by WSUS. I totally appreciate the goals of it, we do this all the time in the Linux world, but it is just so poorly done. I'm dealing with an environment with it right now and my first question "can't we just remove WSUS and have that fix all the problems?" WSUS generally solves nothing in the SMB but introduces a lot of cost, complexity and problems of its own. It's just extra fragility often there for no purpose other than to intentionally disrupt rapid patching.
Without WSUS you loose the free reporting tool that tells you what machines have and haven't been updated.
I am pretty sure MS has a new cloud tool for this with Windows 10, but I haven't tried it yet.
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@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Why is it so commonly considered acceptable in the Windows world to become beholden to software that is either not supported or poorly supported?
I'm guessing sunk cost. They paid for it, and now it's unsupported so they are either going to have to spend more money on another solution or just not pay anything and stay where they are.
The hospital I interviewed at was using full desktops pretty much as thin clients and they were still on XP. If I remember right they had issues with some part of their EMR or something on 10, so they weren't going to update to that. But they would have to pay for 7 or 8.1.
Obviously this would have been mitigated by not using a thick client with a full OS as a thin client, but I wouldn't be surprised if the director got a kickback for doing that.
The kick back seems less likely (though possible). To me it seems like the organic nature of migrations lead to this situation. They already had PCs deployed for old app. They deployed a new app that used TS. TS could be run from the existing PCs, so there would be no cost involved at the end user side. So why spend money when you don't have to?
It was all VDI with Horizon. They had around 500 VDIs and only had one RDS which was only for a couple people. I would think that if you can afford 500 VDI licenses you can at least start to migrate to thin clients which are like $200-300 (or something else).
