(this was a replay to a forum post about the new features in Windows Server 2008)

Paul Thurrott a guy who writes the superset for Windows also does a podcast with Leo Laporte on Windows.  Paul is a nice enough guy but he clearly doesn’t look at the competitors to Windows server 2008 before he posted a review.  That is write a review is structured to list the features of Windows server 2008 and he doesn’t really critically analyze what they’re doing with their new version.  I can tell you I got to listen to the Windows server 2008 list the features and explain in detail what they’re doing with their new version.  It looks good on paper what they’re done with 2008 and I commend them and making their product better.  I say this because this is actually a step down from Windows XP which is a huge step down from Windows 2000.  So it’s nice to see Microsoft actually do something to improve a product and not make it worse.  That being said if you actually look at what they’re doing with Windows server 2008 its a joke compared to a modern Linux system.  I’ll give you a list of the new features and their relationship to features that we already have in modern Linux distributions running a server OS.
•    One of their more highly touted features is the fact that you can run the server without GUI interface now.  We have had that on Linux servers since the beginning.
•    This feature actually cracked me up whenever I heard about it.  They are advertising now that when your machine needs to install and update it only installs updates particular to your machine and Windows server 2008 but the real kicker is when they said that those updates still require a restart. In Linux it’s always been the case that you only install updates particular to your machine and the software that is running and we do not require restarts for anything except kernel upgrades. The example that he gave was language packs and if you only install the English language patch when there is inning were English-language update it requires a machine restart this is ridiculous.
•    Another thing that makes me laugh is that Windows server has always had it in the service manual that the machine should be restarted once a month.  I am not joking this is in the service manual.  On a Linux system I’ve seen up time that is over one year without a restart.  What I love about Microsoft is they then get away with saying their servers have no down time but in fact they don’t account for that two to three minutes of restart time every month.  They should not be allowed to get away with this false advertising.
I’m not the best person to talk about server related issues though because security is not the reason why use Linux.  Stability and ease-of-use are why use Linux.  Ultimately I am more of Web and application designer than I am a server person.  That being said whenever I was in high school I did take third in a state networking competition…
Check out this episode of windows weekly http://twit.tv/ww45