Having used commercial software on Linux in the manufacturing sector, support is usually only provided for a few main distros anyway (Debian, Red Hat and SuSE in my case). If you can get the binary to run on another distro, then that's great, but you are not going to get anything close to the same level of support as the officially sanctioned distros. For most applications I actually don't see that as a major problem, although RMS would certainly have something to say about the restriction of choice; it's still Linux, and in a commercial setting you are probably choosing the best OS/distro for your required apps anyway, rather than the other way around.<br><br>

Another problem was the issue of libraries, particularly when they were more obscure on one distro but bundled with another. A poke around in the dependencies for the various packages revealled that the typical solution here was either to statically link any such libraries across the board, or in a few cases to do so selectively from distro to distro, dynamically linking to the distro provided versions where available and statically linking the rest. Worst case scenario would be to just statically link the entire lot, which is an approach I've seen used for several Linux games - commercial or otherwise.<br><br>

So, it's not as if the problems don't have solutions, although they are not necessarily ideal, which leave me thinking it's more to do with the low return on the time and effort required. Unless you are working off the back of one of the major Linux desktop migrations that pop-up from time to time and making the binaries available to all, you have a much smaller userbase, split across multiple distros that are potentially different enough to be treated like different OSs from a compilation and support perspective. Each distro you support gets you more users, but adds to the cost of developing, compiling and testing the code, plus supporting it when you are done, and for many apps, particularly the more complication ones the numbers almost certainly just don't add up. So perhaps the real question is "what can the Linux community do to make the numbers add up?"

I appreciate your thoughts, but I turned to WebMin/VirtualMin precisely because I don't spend enough time in Linux to be completely comfortable managing every server application at the terminal, even though I am otherwise aware of general administrative needs and procedures. The hope was that it would help me manage Postfix, sendmail, LDAP, user management, various webmail daemons, Apache, SpamAssassin, WordPress, SSL Certificate management, etc., without having to remember or cheat sheet everything. To an extent it does that, but very imperfectly. Without it, there's a huge nut to crack, as evidenced by a ridiculously long primer on setting up a personal mail server that Ars Technica recently featured.

There's no real reason a Linux mail server should be an order of magnitude more difficult to administer than an Exchange server. But without VirtualMin or something like it, it is. (There's a damn good reason that CPanel gets away with charging as much as it does.)

I don't particularly care if I lose massive geek points saying it and trying to rely on the server side tools, but I'm quite sure there are others like me who are otherwise competent but don't yet have the shell wizardry to go bareback.

Again, thanks for the feedback.

I fully agree. GUI and servers have nothing to do with each other. I am all for GUI "control panels" for the normal home user, as Linux will not succeed if the normal user is not able to change some settings in their own computers.

As a server administrator I would hate GUI for servers. Instead I use a combination of scripting, salt-stack and direct ssh contact. Lets take this trivial case: In the fall when the schools begin, I end up creating user accounts for every single new student. I receive name lists. Those list I format into the way I want (sed/vim). Then I run the lists trough a script I made which will create random password, make their home directories and set up everything right for them. Out I get a csv file containing their usernames and passwords. That csv file I can use in any office application. How do you do that efficiently by GUI?

It is not a coincidence PowerShell appeared in Windows. Any administrator not able to script is pretty much a worthless administrator. A such person is wasting time (=money) by doing over and over the same task. Mistakes will creep in here and there as with any repeated task.

Another case: Lets say a service has hung. Now I am able even with my phone and a simple ssh client to take remote connection and restart the service. As soon you have GUI and VNC/RDP/Whatever GUI you need more bandwith and working over a slow mobile connection might be almost impossible. Take then screen size also into account.