Infrastructure · 2022
Most of my lab was running on Windows VMs, and licensing every one of them, plus rebuilding them each time an evaluation period ran out, got old. Most of the services were cross-platform anyway, so I moved them onto Linux and learned how to run them in a different world.
The Windows VMs (LTSC, Server 2012) meant licensing to deal with and evaluation periods that expired, forcing me to recreate machines from scratch. I was experimenting, not running production, so that overhead wasn't worth it. Since most of the services ran fine on either platform, moving them to Linux made sense, and it was a good excuse to actually learn how to deploy things outside of Windows.
Free. No licensing to track or renew.
Fewer restarts, so services stayed up longer.
Windows was reliable, but the pending-update nag was a constant low-level annoyance. Linux dropped that.
Much finer control over the OS itself.
Real time on the command line, navigating the filesystem, and unpacking and deploying applications the Linux way.
Linux does everything Windows does here, but some of it lives on the command line, so you have to know your way around. It's less beginner-friendly, though most of what I was doing wasn't beginner-level to begin with. Worth it for what I got back.