There becomes a time in ones career when you have to make a choice about which direction you want to take and you’re unsure if it’s for the better or the worse. I’ve had a fondness for Windows since I started using the Windows computers at school and have never looked back since.
I got to this stage a couple of months back when I felt like I needed to push myself and explore an area which up until now I’ve only gone into in my spare time… Linux. Windows roles have become more and more in cloud based as Microsoft Azure products have matured and more organizations moved to their services as part of lockdown but still it doesn’t seem to get the same kudos as Linux does.
Big changes and challenges with the move
Less gui and more command line – As much as people may tell you that you that most Linux systems have brilliant guis for you to use this more than likely won’t be the case when your a sys admin. Part of running Linux servers over Windows is that they use less resources and are mostly quicker than most other OS. When you’re running a server the thought of slowing things down with a gui seems to be in conflict with what you want from server. You also cannot do everything via the gui and will have to revert to command line even for some of the most basic tasks. This means the likelihood of finding a Linux server with a gui is very slim.
Different scripting languages – Within the Windows bubble you’ll most likely come across many admin scripts which will be written in Batch or PowerShell. PowerShell in particular is now a very mature and modern product that brings lots of cmdlets together to allow someone to pretty much do anything. When it came to Linux most of the scripts I’ve come across so far are either Python or Perl which aren’t so modern as PoweShell and take some getting use to. The problem I’ve had so far is that a lot of Linux sysadmins seem to play a game of making the script as small as possible but this can sometimes make it hard to read and follow if you didn’t create the script.
Kudos and image – Even though working in IT you normally don’t get the most customer focused people, image is still a big thing. Gone are the days that you have an IT team in the basement who don’t want to talk to anyone, instead everyone is wanting to share their knowledge through open source and being collaborative. Making a name for yourself by being collaborative is now part of the package of a systems admin. Windows admins seem to still keep things quite close to their chest whereas Linux admins want to show off their coding skills and prove to other people and themselves that they know their stuff. This then relates back to not using a gui since anyone can do that and you must be better if you don’t require one and write everything you want to do.
Questions and answers
Knowing what I know now would I do it again? Short answer is yes, as much as it’s been a shock to the system I believe it’s been an overall positive experience.
What would I do differently? I think I would do a lot more research into Linux best practice so that I can justify the actions I take. I believe about working smarter not harder and if that means still using Windows on my laptop or a Linux gui then that’s what I should do.
Got personal experience? Please comment below