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Windows vs. Linux vs. OS X

CIO John Halamka reviews the desktop operating system contenders in search of the next-generation office computer.

By Meridith Levinson

PAGE 9

What he disliked: Although a stable operating system like
Red Hat is easier to manage, it also doesn't support the latest technologies, features and functionality. Sometimes, it doesn't even support tried-and-true technologies like USB drives or basic features like sleep. A potential stumbling block to deployment at CareGroup, Halamka found, is that RHEL doesn't incorporate the drivers that automatically detect networks or support new hardware, such as those wireless broadband cards or the tablet computers clinicians use to access electronic health records and e-prescribing applications.

Neither RHEL nor Fedora could recognize a USB drive when Halamka plugged one into his laptop. Each time he added one, he had to mount it manually by writing a command. Thus, moving 250MB of files from his MacBook to his Lenovo X41 took him two hours. Halamka notes that his Linux engineers, who have been using Fedora on their own computers, were eventually able to get that OS to recognize USB drives after installing the necessary updates.

When Halamka wasn't using his computer, the RHEL OS sucked the life out of its battery or the electrical outlet into which it was plugged because he couldn't put it to sleep. Fedora's sleep feature worked half the time. When it didn't function properly, he had to reboot.

Fedora's major problem, according to Halamka, is that the operating system is in "permanent beta." It's a standard procedure in the development of Fedora for open-source developers to constantly release updates and enhancements and leave it to the user community to test for interoperability with other applications. Consequently, when Halamka downloaded these updates onto his computer, they often caused other applications to crash. He says figuring out which applications would work and which wouldn't after downloading 200MB of updates every few days "was liking spinning a roulette wheel."

On the application side, neither RHEL's nor Fedora's version of the open-source e-mail application Evolution worked well as a client for Microsoft's Exchange server. In two days of trying, Halamka wasn't able to synchronize his Evolution client with CareGroup's Exchange server because Evolution was so unstable. If the process of synchronizing the messages on Halamka's hard drive with the Exchange server was interrupted for any reason (for instance, if the network was slow) the synchronization operation restarted from the beginning.

Evolution was so temperamental that Halamka couldn't use his computer for anything while Evolution was syncing with Exchange. What's more, Evolution frequently locked up and required forced quits, requiring Halamka to turn to Outlook Web Access to synch with Exchange. Were it not for that workaround, Halamka might not have been able to use e-mail—an untenable situation for someone whose job relies upon it.

The problems Halamka encountered with Linux on the desktop meant he had to build as much as an extra hour into his day for troubleshooting—even after one of his Linux engineers spent 20 hours over the course of one week configuring his machine. (This was not the smooth, out-of-the-box experience he had had with his MacBook.) And although Halamka is an accomplished Unix administrator (he wrote a textbook on Unix at the ripe old age of 19), tinkering with the operating systems took up precious time. "I don't want to spend my day writing command lines," he says.

Workarounds: Halamka couldn't connect to CareGroup's corporate network the first time he tried doing so running RHEL. The OS didn't quickly recognize the wired connection or have the drivers for his flavor of wireless connectivity. One of his Linux engineers told him how to manually activate both the wireless and wired connections by selecting "Network" from the "System Settings" menu and providing a root password. That seemed to solve the problem for the wired connection, but he had to activate the wireless connection each time he wanted to use it.

<< Linux: Admirable, But Not Yet an Option   |   Linux: Admirable, But Not Yet an Option - Conclusion >>

 

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