Windows current state
I am currently working for a company deploying Office 365 and frankly the *mind-blowing* current incompatibilities within the MS world between office apps and combinations of their OS has driven me to a point to just utterly give up on windows at home.
Besides the office incompatibilities the Win8+ vein of OS's I have found to increase the number of key strokes / mouse clicks to do the same thing as I did in Win7. The insanity of the dual control panel / PC settings continues into the Win10 realm too.
The mind numbing management decisions to try and turn a PC into a tablet and turn what I felt was a very attractive Desktop Environment (DE) in Win7 into something designed by a retarded child with pastel primary coloured boxes with controls spread everywhere has driven me kinda batty.
Linux 2000 - 2014
Over the years I have had many stabs at running a Linux system at home, from Madrake back in the early 2000's to SUSE to several attempts at RHL and Centos.
Unfortunately the complexity of entry and relative unstable / barely usable combinations at the beginning bared me from really picking up the platform. Also back then I still played games would of struggled without my Civ / Total War games!
Most previous and the closes attempts in 2014 were ElementaryOS and Mint Linux, though these where highly usable / hardware compatible and didn't look like utter crap, the one app I required to work, fancontrol, wouldn't work on my hardware. This app was a requirement due to overheating.
Linux 2016
I finally bit the bullet and installed few Linux's DE's on my work laptop. Ubuntu was bsolute pleasant surprise, lightning fast, and with a few apps Ubuntu is highly configurable and without the glitches you get from KDE plasma (graphical tearing, crashing apps) if you step slightly outside KDE's defaults.
With the success of running Buntu as my primary home machine for couple of months I finally decided in combinations with my frustrations at work with the direction of MS, I have decided to move my fleet into the 'nix space.
Requirements
Currently systems:
- Windows File server (running also Plex),
- AD, DHCP, WSUS.
- My previous SCCM build expired its license so I never bothered to refresh that system but would like to have something similar in 'nix world
- PC's and Laptops OS
- Gargoyle router OS with bandwidth monitoring / quotas / shaping
Desired Systems:
- Directory Services (AD replacement)
- File Server
- Plex Server
- Central App / Update deployment + internet caching
- Fleet Management / Monitoring
Linux Systems to be tested:
- Ubuntu DE's
- Ubuntu Server
- Fedora DE's
- Fedora Server
- Ubuntu Landscape
- Puppet
- Squid Server (transparent cache with bandwidth monitoring / quotas / shaping)
Ill be posting about my trials in moving to the open tomatoey saucy world over the next few months :)
