On that note, these administration issues are why Walmart & Kroger are on SUSE, much of the IT work you see smaller chains employing people to do has been automated away, or reduced to having any available employee follow a (very simple) guide on how to netboot the machine for re-imaging.

A very simple FAI or Kickstart server with small tools to enable provisioning can automate a lot of things in a non-IT oriented workspace.

A simple HTML form to "arm" the installation server, a simple reboot and PXE booting can be much more effective than all the painkillers combined for remedying the headaches of IT people and managers alike.

If you don't roll changes that often, you can distribute emergency USBs to install servers and workstations. Even a single USB can detect and install the system accordingly.

Hell yeah we're going to fight over it. Whenever something that works is turned into something that sucks, we gotta point it out until it's no longer sucky.

I think there's a misunderstanding. I was talking about fighting over "MS vs. Linux" on the subject of administration paradigm.

Of course we should point out sucky tools regardless of its platform.

> scriptability of CLI tools and pliability of text files >trumps all computer automa

I feel the need to sing, "You may have both.... you _may_ have both.... it's not so hard to imagine... MS even did it in certain products..."

Yes, it's technically possible. However, it's not always implemented like that. Also, in reality we don't have both, at least in my realm.

Being able to tune a system from top to bottom solely with text files is just amazing. Also, some people hate "everything is a file" philosophy, but it's the enabler of this configurability.

When I started programming Linux and saw that everything was accessible via normal file system, it was a big relief compared to W32's iceberg environment, where you cannot see everything and sometimes water is too cold to dive that deep.