No Windows!

I'm for 25 years on linux now. I began with both Linux/Unix and Windows. I went away from Windows since it was a dependency of some proprietary software vendor's will. I decided, not wanting to surrender to such. The choice was against easy-peasy administration GUIs. Against Click-and-Run Installers. Against unreasonable choices of vendors. If you dig deeper within the windows world, it will get hard too - harder than linux/unix.

Going the hard way

The choice also meant learning it the hard way. Read the documents. Search the web for troubleshooting hints. Various levels of debugging through anything that gets in the way. Mostly it has been a hard time and only little leaning back. Always a lot to learn because there is so much to learn here. Webservers, DNS-Servers, Mailservers, various types of Scripting languages, 1000 other types of servers and services. A little time of programming here and there.

The way keeps rocky

One or two times I got pleased with where I'd got to, but that did not last long. The path goes on and on. Nowadays with Infrastructure Management(Chef), Kubernetes and Docker, Ceph and who the hell knows what there will be coming next. Sometimes I'm frustrated about this crazy complexity everywhere and I'm not sure if everything of that is good.

At the moment I'm quite happy with kubernetes and docker as this seems - despite a whole lot of complexity - to make things easier to manage.

Vendors keep baiting you

And the trap of vendor dependency/lock in lures everywhere. You want a LoadBalancer-Service? Come to us(AWS,GKE,Azure,...). Just come to
us. We do it everything for you with some simple clicks(and a price tag). Oh? Your Disk speed is too low? Just buy an upgrade for more IOPS, you can always do that!

I decide to stay on the path of independence, even if that's harder than the other way round. If I do not, I may end up in the space of "I can do nothing, I'm trapped with the solution or the vendor, I/We bought."

A situation like the one bakunin mentioned with his starting post:

As often said here: Companies always want to make money. Complexity is good in terms of money-making. The more complexity, the more technical expertise can be sold. Complex products are very good products in terms of profit for the vendor.

At the moment Microsoft baits users into her Cloud(huge email storage for ridiculous prices). I'm curious where this leads to.

Choose your path! Either one won't be free of pain.

What I like about linux is that it's like a car and you are supposed to open the hood and a lot of it is carefully designed(ok - something is really bullshit too) and you get lots of great documentation. That's a lot of help on the hard way.

Regards,
Stomp