Windows or Linux?

BLOMASKY

I have a potential new customer who will require a cloud based solution. Is there any reason to NOT use Linux since it is much cheaper than windows? I have only used Aware windows so far. Does Linux give me a GUI so I can view logs in real time? Any suggestions?

Bruce

PointsWell

As long as you have a desktop installed you can run the full GUI.

joben

BLOMASKY wrote
Is there any reason to NOT use Linux since it is much cheaper than windows?

If you are equally good at Windows and Linux, pick what you prefer. If you don't know a lot about Linux, don't use it in a production evironment unless you like working extra hours 🙂

UnionSystems

We’d prefer to use Linux but you need to run a Windows AwareIM server if you want to use the User Defined Documents functionality with MS Word or MS Excel documents as you need to have MS Word installed on the AwareIM server?

Rem

So, do you really NEED Windows server. We are running all our systems on Windows servers, but we are also Microsoft partners. Can you not use Windows 10? Do you need any of the added functionality that a server OS has? I don’t think you will need AD, DNS, Hyper-V, cluster or whatever.

If I was you, I would try with Windows 10 and see if it works.

gernotlg

I'm not far from launching myself, so I if may add further query to this discussion..

From what I can make of this is (going by above responses) ...

"..To run on Linux, you need to have a desktop.. "

1... so we'd need a distro with a GUI ?

What would be the best distro for that ? Or what are you veterans running your AwareIM servers on ?

I have a VPS setup for this already, but haven't installed AwareIM server yet.. and can change Linux distro before I install. I can even change to Windows... but I don't see any sense in making a server out of windows when we all know windows is a just a resource hog with more security holes than you can poke a stick at.

So really my only question is for any suggestions of a Linux Distro with GUI that would be best as an AwareIM Server, and running MySQL 8 ?

Thanks

joben

Never ran AwareIM on Linux, but I can give you some basic information that might come in handy:

Linux distros like Ubuntu come in different flavors, like server versions with pre-installed packages for a server environment, desktop versions with a GUI out of the box, etc. All of these packages can be installed afterwards so it's not really a big deal if you don't get it right the first time. You can even change to a different GUI if you don't like the included one.
But the thing that probably matters the most is that you get a LTS version so your distro is supported for a long time.
Upgrading between major versions is something I personally like to avoid.

My opinion is that if you are familiar with Windows, you should go with it. As long as you update it regularly, there is nothing to worry about security-wise. Remember that Linux had a serious security flaw in Bash since 1989 that wasn't officially discovered and patched until 2014. This sort of stuff happens, even in the Open Source world.
Windows does use more resources than Linux, but RAM sticks are pretty cheap 😃

gernotlg

Thanks