Back in 1993, I was tasked by my girlfriend (now wife) to find a way to do work at home instead of going to NUS in order to share the server to do projects, etc. Within Comp Sci Fac itself, they had 3 common terminal rooms where everyone could log into the central sun server, or login to the S17 new building for additional access. Dialup was possible, but the lines were often full, and dialing up to leonis was also terrible.
We just had tons of comp sci compilations to do. C, C++, Pascal, lisp, prolog, whatever.
Together with another requirement to network up her home for her siblings for file sharing and ppp gateway, we decided to download the 44 floppy slackware.
44.
When one was corrupted, the effort of installation would be put on hold until we returned to the damned campus to download (faster using their network than use our phone bills) and rawrite into the disk.
That was the start.
Between now and today, Linux has been a platform for my whole family for stability with sacrificed use for peripherals and applications. I wine when I can. I Crossover when I can. I vmware when I can. Between then and now I use linux for a variety of tasks otherwise performed with more expensive hardware and more expensive (licensing) software. At first from 96 till 99, it was all about outdoing everything my company wanted to achieve with Microsoft. From 99 to 02 I used it extensively for all aspects when I was running my vendor / solutions provider company -- voip gatekeeper, radius account for billed wireless and/or voip stuff, web/application/3-tier/whatever, mysql/oracle/postgresql, adsl gateway/fw, honeypot, security, hosting, monitoring. After I left to join this MNC, it's where Linux gets really stretched to the limit where I start to understand why there are a few things users want and cannot get from the enterprise point of view.
Can I have a dynamically growing fs using LVM on a MD, such that the fs is supported by RHEL (cannot be reiserfs, xfs, jfs)? How about LVM snap copies (HP-UX's/IBM lvcreate -m) instead of snap shots (linux lvcreate -s)? How about dynamic LUN allocation from SAN (EVA5000, XP512)? Does it have backup and boot and restore file metadata and structure TO and from tape like HP-UX's make_tape_recovery?
But these 10+ years of linux really got me picking up quite a lot of self-learnt concepts which others have difficulty picking up if they don't have access to them if they come from, say, HP-UX. What are the chances you can get a LVM aware person from a pool of linux folks from, say, a pool of HP-UX or AIX folks? Who can be product independent when it comes to clustering software (M/C service guard vs Solaris sun suite vs RH Cluster suite vs ha-linux vs... ). Who can scope based on system-based or SAN-based or NAS-based async replication or mirror split online and dynamic-sized when it comes to database snap backups? How about being backup software independent like Tivoli Storage Manager, or Veritas Netbackup, or Arkeia, or Legato Networker, or...? How come Linux can mount SAN volumes which are formatted for Sun's UFS or Sun/HP's VxFS or HPUX's HFS?? What kind of OS IS THIS?!
I'm ranting too much. What I'm trying to say is this : against Microsoft, it was hardly any fight when I deployed linux as and whenver possible. Even now. But against enterprise unix OS's, it may seem probably on the losing side at first, but the more you stretch linux to the fullest, the easier it is for you to pick up the various components these so-called enterprise unix OS's have. Linux offers the best bang for the buck by containing, as much as possible, all the server/enterprise range of features commonly found in other operating systems. Yet all the strengths of a unix system.
Not to mention all my personal and now 80% (*sigh* 20% require windows for SIP-based MSN messanger -- company policy) of work desktops have been fully linux for the past 3 years. It's only recently I've begun to use Microsoft for various deployments (Oracle OID and Unix NIS migration to Active Directory)