Reliability: Unix and Linux beat Windows (heise online)

Reliability: Unix and Linux beat Windows (heise online)

Posted May 3, 2008 18:24 UTC (Sat) by anton (guest, #25547)
In reply to: Reliability: Unix and Linux beat Windows (heise online) by kripkenstein
Parent article: Reliability: Unix and Linux beat Windows (heise online)

what *did* surprise me was Ubuntu besting Debian.

My explanation is: A company that pays for round-the-clock staff usually will want a commercial enterprise distro installed, not a community project like Debian. So the larger downtimes of Debian systems compared to others are not due to a higher failure rate, but due to a larger average downtime when a failure occurs; e.g., if the system crashes on Friday night, it may have between several hours and 2.5 days of downtime ahead. Yes, a hardware watchdog would help availability, but for some servers availability is not everything.

Since Ubuntu is based on Debian unstable, and much more fast-moving than Debian in general, I always assumed Ubuntu would be less reliable.

Ubuntu does its own testing, so the difference may not be so big.

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