Having managed both, I have to disagree very strongly. A GUI works fine when you want to manage one machine (although it's kind of a pain in comparison to SSH), but when you want to manage dozens, you need sharper knives. The tools available for automating devops (chef, puppet, etc.) are very oriented towards UNIX-based OSes. We have around 70 Linux machines in our production system today, and if I had to manage them through RDP and GUIs, I'd probably quit and become an alpaca farmer.

I think it's easier to manager a service on Linux that has one, or maybe two, text files for configuration. They often ship with every option available, even is commented out, and a little note detailing exactly what the option is for.

My only real experience with Windows Server was having to add a new mime type for .fla files for IIS. The .fla were downloading instead of playing. The option was buried deep in in multiple configuration windows and dialogue boxes. It took forever compared to what a simple AddType would have taken in an Apache text file.

Honestly, admin on Linux is not that hard, and server most tools out there were designed for linux first, and Windows instructions are often of poor quality or lacking entirely.

I'm not advocating that anyone use Windows, just saying that in practice licensure isn't as hard of an operational problem as it might seem. The price still hurts, though.

If i were to do a big enterprisey project with a big budget i would definitely be more likely to go with windows while if i were to do a web/online start-up i would more likely pick Linux.

But really big enterprisey stuff with really big budget? It's all Oracle DB + Java on Unix there.

Just as all the really big infrastructures (Google, FedEx, Amazon, etc.) are all Unix.

You can script practically anything using powershell and multi server management using powershell remoting.

System center + ad group policy is light years ahead anything else.

Configuration and management on Linux is anything but standardized, but it's almost always as simple as changing the right line in the right file in /etc. Also, the ecosystem is so large and mature that tools have been built to make things simpler.

You can manage Windows machines via PowerShell, but that doesn't mean it's easier in practice than SSH and Linux -- particularly given the toolsets (Chef/Puppet/etc) that have been created around it.

After a significant amount of experience in the .NET ecosystem, I believe the majority of the anti-Microsoft sentiment is well-deserved. At one point, there was a lot of innovation in .NET OSS, but it seems to have ground to a halt within the last few years. It's possible I'm just projecting because of my own experience, but it seems like many of the more influential members of the .NET ecosystem have gone on to do other things.

It's not that Microsoft or .NET is bad -- it's just that there are better options.

I think the biggest problem for me isn't some attachment to Windows Server (I much prefer working on a Linux server), or some misplaced love for WebForms (ick!), but the C# language in general.

There are a lot of great dynamic language setups on Linux (Rails, various Python stacks, etc) which aren't bad or anything... but I always find working in a dynamic language to be a bit of a hindrance. I've been writing a multiplayer game server in Go, and I can't even begin to list the hours of work compile-time type tests have saved me during early development as I constantly refactor. But on the other hand, I wouldn't want to write a large "business" style web-app in Go (my day job), which really doesn't have a standards library tailored for it.

I also get the feeling that the dynamic language web-stacks suffer from relatively poor performance compared to the CLR, and for some of the clients I work with who need to do some fairly complex non-database processing, this wouldn't be a great thing. Maybe this concern is unfounded though.

Perhaps Java is the closest match to .NET, both in style and in spirit. But having done a fair amount of Java development for Android, Java just feels so clumsy and clunky... The language isn't as nice, the tools aren't as nice, and the standard library just doesn't compare in terms of letting my express myself quickly and easily.

When one of my clients needs a web-app, I always go .NET. These projects won't ever be scaling to millions of users, so server licensing really isn't an issue. On the other hand, there will be lots of direction changes no matter the amount of planning, so static typing can be a God-send with the safety blanket it provides. And C# really lets me write clean code more quickly than in anything else I've worked with.

If I we're creating a product for a start-up, I probably wouldn't go with it... licensing costs would be an issue. But then again, if I was running a start-up, hopefully it wouldn't be a relatively boring business-app that was best suited to something like .NET. And if I were creating a product for a huge number of users, it'd be worth pouring in the development time to have a super high performance back-end in a language separate from the quick-to-add-features-to Ruby front-end.

But for my use case, I just haven't found a better option yet. I'd love some suggestions though, because I'm not a big fan of Microsoft these days and wouldn't mind being less at-mercy of their platform. Maybe my concerns are unfounded though, and I'm just stuck in what I know, but I do branch out a lot for personal projects.

I adore C# as a language, and the CLR as a platform. If not for the Windows requirement, I would write quite a bit more C# than I do now. (See my other comments on why Mono isn't good enough as a platform-independent option.)

Let's be honest, JavaScript is a goofy language with all sorts of ugly parts, but it's surging in popularity because of the power of the platforms on which it's used (browsers and Node.js).

Lua is another language which I've taken a liking to recently. It has a beautiful, clean, simple syntax -- it's basically like dynamic C -- but its standard library is horribly weak. That's why I think it's relegated to embedding.

The .NET standard library is amazingly powerful, but the only "real" implementation of it requires Windows. My point is: it's not enough to be a good language, you need strong platform support.

That's not entirely true. Pretty much the entire ASP.net MVC stack has now been open-source. Entity Framework is also open-source.

I agree, 3rd party OSS ecosystem is much smaller than Java.

Why isn't something like Cassandra or Hadoop written using .NET? It's the Windows requirement that makes ideas like that die on the vine.

Shit, there are more interesting systems built using Erlang/OTP than there are for .NET.

Edit: RavenDB is probably the closest thing to new tech that's currently happening on .NET, and it's because Oren Eini is one of the few innovators left in the ecosystem.

Where did the parent say anything about innovation?

I said it.

No, there are better options for you.

I have to disagree. Windows Server has the illusion of ease, but the same mechanisms that guide your hand in the early days turn into a major hindrance later on. There isn't a Windows server running anywhere that doesn't have event logs jammed full of potentially deadly warnings and errors, and most "easily" setup Windows servers are setup insecurely and wrong.

In my personal experience (and I have a lot of experience with both) I've always found Linux build outs much more predictable and easy.

As to the "counter culture", that goes back to when Microsoft really were the pricks of the technology world. They've gotten much better, but it's hard to shake that.

We can also use virtualisation everywhere, for testing, quick deployment, offsite deployment, cloud... without worrying about licenses.

The fact that EC2 Linux is significantly cheaper than Azure is just a bonus.