Even the commercial flavours of linux don't really cut the mustard at high loads.
As soon as you start going over about 0.7 your log files start filling up and its starts chuntering. You can get away with running what would be high work loads on a MS machine at very low loads on a linux box makes the clueless think its a straight swap and they are happy. Then they stick a thin frontend DB application on it and the whole thing goes to rat poo.
Linux as a desktop I think is cracking, it really doesn't get anyware near the grade as say a solaris enterprise server which it is mean't to be replacing as a server. If you want a fly websever setup it can manage. Anything serious it falls over.
Actually I think Linux does protect the user better than windows does. You can run it in dafty mode and the OS won't let you compromise the OS. The simple fact that it default installs to running a normal user account removes 80% of the potential for murdering it. Add in packages and respo's and auto updates the potential for disaster is significantly less.
And mixture my experence is the opersite to yours. The folk who have access to the hardware is extremely limited, far more so than root access. And its not uncommon to have a hardware 24h standby as well as a sys admin standby. Some of the guru's I have worked with I wouldn't trust to rewire a plug never mind pull a machine out of the rack and hot swap a processor or network card. But get them writing scripts and doing fancy poo with NIS+ etc and they leave me in there wake.
Last edited by mad_jock; 3rd Mar 2011 at 09:15.