> Oracle goes out of their way to make it a pain in the ass to install their jdk.

1 - Download from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8...

2 - install package

3 - configure PATH

Yes, there are apt repos available. Also yum repos (see links and docs at http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zulu/downloads).

On x86, if you can measure performance diffs between same-version OpenJDK/Zulu and OracleJDK, you are probably measuring noise. Zulu is simply a binary build of OpenJDK. As far as we can tell, the performance is identical because the source is the same.

From Java7, I thought both Oracle jdk and OpenJDK were almost the same. Does Oracle still offer an edge over performance?

In my experience yes. It is especially clear on more limited (ARM) devices (Chromebook ARM, Atom/Celeron laptops) though; if you get stuff running at all, it is very slow; swap Oracle JDK in and it's suddenly very usable. I myself don't do a lot with server side Java anymore, but my colleagues tell me the same things, but it's fast enough for most applications there. On the client it's far more obvious.

Huh? On Linux getting Oracle JDK is a matter of wget und tar. On Windows and Mac OS you get an installer. If you want OpenJDK on Windows or Mac OS you have to build from source.

For me the real difference is that you don't get Flight Recorder on OpenJDK.

Are the webupd8 repositories for Oracle JDK are too problematic from security standpoint?

The webupd8 PPA repositories are only available for Debian-based distros. Perhaps parent is running RHEL or CentOS.