On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 06:38:45PM -0500, Lex Spoon wrote: > > I think for the kind of money you are talking about, you can hire > administrators who know Unix. Honestly: wouldn't you want professional > (or at least competent) adminstrators for Windows, too? Ease of Windows > administration is a myth; hardware upgrades are fairly minor > administration, and most people who have tried know how difficult this > can be under Windows. It only gets worse if you want to set up network > services, and perhaps even (gasp) some sort of security to protect users > from each other. > > So, real question is whether you can make *using* the systems easy, not > whether installing and maintaining them can be easy. The answer is > probably yes, but your admin will have to make it a priority (which many > Unix admins do not).
I would like to agree with this 100%. I've heard many times that people (students) are running BackOriffice and related stuff on Windows machines at school and the "admins" don't even know what is going on. Thus a Unix sys admin that know what he/she is doing is a key here - IMHO Debian is very easy to administer (for a sys-admin) as you do not have to worry as much about config file defaults as they are usually sane. Providing a good job and saving money -- a win-win situation. OTOH, making a new distribution that is "easy" to administer would take months and the easiness would probably come at a cost of less flexibility (or at least you would have to go back the the good old /etc dir). - Adam