That's an issue, but chef has some really nice things in place to help like 1:1 relationships for push jobs or you can have the chef client just check in with the server so you don't ssh into it and "push" things to it, but let it call back to you. Are there issues, sure? And ansible solves this....with a master key/ssh keypair that's on every box for you to get and once you do you know you have SSH access + an admin user.

I've worked with Chef and puppet for a few years each and evaluated ansible at my current company because it's the new buzzword and it's clientless. My concerns for not wanting to go with Ansible for system management was that to get the web endpoints for things like auto-scaling you have to get Tower. And if I'm going to pay $10k to setup tower, I might as well setup a Chef server which will scale FAR more than Tower will on the same hardware and will cost substantially less. Also, to really be effective with Ansible you need to setup a user/password (or ssh keypair) combination which I really don't like because if it's compromised, you're whole infrastructure is compromised. Chef has safeguards to help with this and you'd still have a bit of panic if a key is compromised, but you're not required to put "root" keys on everything. So there's still damage, but it's mitigated and can be corrected. Finally, Chef 12 really helps give me overall system state of everything out of the box which I absolutely love. You don't get that with Ansible until you get Tower.. Anyway, my two cents.. I am curious though what this means for Ansible moving forward.

When we moved into our house, I managed to pick up a full rack off craigslist. I'd planned to populate it with all my servers (a collection of vintage Unix systems as well as some modern vmware nodes). Part way through I realized I value a cooler and quieter room so I've been working to move everything over to quieter systems. For my vintage collection there's not much I can do -- SGI and Sun boxes only came in a few ways, but I tend to keep them off for the most part. My "main" systems have gone from a few really loud, power hungry, heaters, to more specific purpose boxes. For example, my FreeNAS box was an older ebay Xeon server complete w/server grade (read: LOUD) fans, but is now an i5 server with more RAM than before (and faster) and it's so quiet I can't tell when it's on. A few other "servers" I'm moving from 2-3U boxes to 4U boxes with larger 120mm fans. I'll probably grow it one or two more servers as things change but I'll be much more focused on power and cooling rather than raw power. The server rack will stay though...My friends that helped move it in said that I had to sell it with the house, so if anyone is looking for a house in Texas in 5-10 years and wants a server rack, I may have just the house ;-)

and I have both a Dell AND Asus with Ubuntu on them -- they work fine.

I think a lot of people in the Linux community these days are people who believe in open source, but really are people who want a Unix-style system, with a slick interface, running on hardware _they_ choose and not hardware pushed on them by a company. For those people, while Open Source is always good, paying for (commercial) software is something you do to support the people who wrote said software. As for the others...I usually don't worry too much about them...they're usually the ones running the latest Ubuntu on some old 400mhz Pentium II and are complaining about how its too slow but refuse to upgrade their hardware... :)

To get on the desktop Linux needs to really get behind a single (or very few) "desktop" distributions like Ubuntu. Distributions that are designed to be extremely easy and try to do as much guesswork for the end-user as possible. I'm in a local user group and everytime this topic comes up, distributions like debian or centos come up...Those are great distributions for advanced users and implementions, but not for that person who just wants it to run on their laptop so they can play World of Warcraft and check facebook. The applications also need a major revamp. This has actually been a ranting issue of mine. Having "qApplicationX" or "gApplicationX" to show if it's a QT/KDE app or GTK+/GNOME app just doesn't work for the end user; they want "ApplicationX". The hardware for Linux requires marketing and would probably take years to make major headway since you really have to have existing marketshare or loads of money to pay the manufacturers. The nice thing about Linux though is its hardware compatibility has come A LONG way in the last 10 years, so supporting Linux companies like system76.com or zareason are good for the community and as long as those companies support some of the more popular, user-friendly distributions, you can safely say "hey, go to this site and you're good to go". You need games too, but this can come from expanded OpenGL support which I think is coming from Apple's and the phone fronts since none of them support DirectX any developer looking to write a game for those platforms will have to learn OpenGL. Lastly, it's okay to mix Windows with Linux. Look at Apple. It's come A LONG way since 2000 when Mac OS X was just coming out and while it has A LOT more games and applications being offered today, many people still purchase a copy of Windows and run it in a virtual session (or dual boot) to compensate for applications and/or business requirements that Mac doesn't have (yet). It's okay for Linux to do the same...

It did, but Microsoft's proven that when a trend is introduced, it stays. Look at the shift in the GUI from Windows 95/98 to ME/2000 to XP? Sure you could always revert back to "classic" look but that's even going away. Look at Vista and Windows 7? Both have Aero, but in Windows 7 (among other things) they fixed it (mostly). Look at ribbons in office 2007 and 2010? In both cases, the users were stuck with ribbons, but at least in 2010 things worked "better".. I think Windows 8 could very well fail, but I think we're seeing a new GUI trend Microsoft is going to push on us. Sure, Windows 9 may fix a lot of things and may even allow you to have....two windows at once instead of the upcomming one window-at-a-time, but unless some huge portion of Windows users (read: something high like 60%+) the "MetroUI" is here to stay with us for at least the next 5 years. The only thing I can say and hope for is that Apple has been doing a very good job marketing to young teens and college bound students to the point that most people around my age (25-35) are very comfortable with Mac's and in many cases seem to prefer them even if they didn't want a mac at first.

To whome it may concern: Thank you for your presentation and dedication to helping me 'fight' Linux! I can honestly say that you have convinced me, now more than ever, to continue to push Linux whenever and wherever available, both in my personal and professional life. Any company I work for, any organization I am involved with, and anyone I assist with computers. I will tell them of my experiences with Windows, the many problems it's had as well as my experience with Linux and its ability to out perform Windows with ease. I am not sure what else to say other than to tell you that I find this dedication to 'fighting' Linux to be simply horrific. It's downright insane to continue to try and smear Linux like you do. The sad thing is, I'd probably be much more of a Windows fan and supporter if only you worked with everyone else rather than try to get rid of them in any way possible to the point that it becomes your obsession. Again, thank you for your help to convince me to KEEP USING LINUX!