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Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'

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Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'

#21

Post by FlorinAndrei »

weavejester wrote: post #7
ErrantX wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows boxes are not really good for web development Unfair! I use Linux and Windows for web dev and they are both equally as good as the other. EDIT; oh come on, at least justify it... :)

Honestly, it depends what you're developing in. If you're developing in .NET, Windows isn't a bad platform. Anything else, and Windows starts to feel like a second-class citizen. For instance, a lot of tools written in Ruby tend to assume a Unix-like environment, even though the language itself is cross-platform. The other problem with Windows is that it doesn't make a very good server, and it's often useful to devel…

Right. If you develop for Windows, then Windows is a pretty good platform.

Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'

#22

Post by iamelgringo »

weavejester wrote: post #11
jimfl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is surely a better server than OS X. Also, the tool set for web development on Windows is very mature and stable. Google is making a business decision here: it is too expensive for them to support Windows at the level of security they desire, which is likely a higher standard than most software development shops, and perhaps many banks.

"Windows is surely a better server than OS X." I've been unable to find anything equivalent to Puppet or Chef on Windows. Might I enquire what tools you use for managing Windows servers? That said, I doubt I'd ever actually use an OSX server. There's little difference in functionality between an OSX server and a Linux server, and Linux servers have no licensing costs to worry about. Currently we're developing on OSX…

I develop Django on Windows, and I deploy on Windows as well. You can use PowerShell to script all of your deployment and server management operations, and you can remotely invoke all of those scripts as well.

I tried RoR on Windows, and it is a second class citizen IMO, so I switched to Python/Django, and I've been happy since. Python/Django are pretty blissfully OS agnostic.

Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'

#23

Post by InclinedPlane »

To a certain degree this is sensible. It will probably make them safer in the short-term.

Ultimately though this is just a TSA level maneuver. It's reactionary, short-sighted, and imperfect to a degree that is likely to make it nearly useless.

Security is a meta-property, for organizations as well as for software. You can't create security in software as a line-item feature. Nor can you create security in a company by using, or not using, a particular tool. Security ultimately is an overarching endeavor. If google is serious about security they need to approach it that way. The particularly dangerous failure mode for google's recent actions is that they think they've made a serious security enhancement (at best it's incremental), they become complacent, and then they get owned harder than before.

Hopefully this is just a teeny, tiny aspect of a larger security initiative, but from the outside it's difficult to tell if that's the case.

Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'

#24

Post by wendroid »

ThomPete wrote: post #6
chl wrote: post #4

Banning the platform most of your users are using doesn't sound like a great idea to me. There's enormous value in eating one's own dogfood (and stuff running in Chrome is an entirely different kind of dogfood than stuff running in IE, on Windows).

Exactly. One has to wonder what kind of culture this fosters with time.

A Windowsless one where one can shrug and go "meh, works for me on Linux" for a change

Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'

#25

Post by weavejester »

iamelgringo wrote: post #22
weavejester wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Windows is surely a better server than OS X." I've been unable to find anything equivalent to Puppet or Chef on Windows. Might I enquire what tools you use for managing Windows servers? That said, I doubt I'd ever actually use an OSX server. There's little difference in functionality between an OSX server and a Linux server, and Linux servers have no licensing costs to worry about. Currently we're developing on OSX…

I develop Django on Windows, and I deploy on Windows as well. You can use PowerShell to script all of your deployment and server management operations, and you can remotely invoke all of those scripts as well. I tried RoR on Windows, and it is a second class citizen IMO, so I switched to Python/Django, and I've been happy since. Python/Django are pretty blissfully OS agnostic.

"You can use PowerShell to script all of your deployment and server management operations, and you can remotely invoke all of those scripts as well."

I've looked into powershell, but remote powershell isn't much better than shell scripts executed over SSH (and in some ways worse). Tools like Capistrano, Puppet, Chef, etc. don't seem to exist for Windows as yet.

Re: Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'

#26

Post by weavejester »

wanderr wrote: post #17
ErrantX wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows boxes are not really good for web development Unfair! I use Linux and Windows for web dev and they are both equally as good as the other. EDIT; oh come on, at least justify it... :)

Me too. I greatly prefer the tools that are available to me in Windows, but apparently I'm a freak for wanting a decent GUI IDE; most of my colleagues just use vim.

Out of interest, which IDE do you use that is Windows-only? Visual Studio?
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