Desktop Engineering: Your Changing Desktop, Part 3

Dec 24, 2000, 12:16 (5 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Ann D. Grummon)

[ Thanks to Vance for this link. ]

"In the final installment of this special three-part series, our industry experts from across all major engineering applications give us their opinions on the OS battle pitting NT against Unix and Linux against both of them...."

Mark Kostovny, C-Solutions:
"Unix will be displaced by Windows because some of the advantages of a Unix workstation have finally disappeared with the recent Windows-based workstations reaching 1000MHz with excellent graphics cards. When the boxes are relatively the same, then ease of use and standardization become the deciding factor, and Windows is the sure winner in that area."

"Linux will become the new Unix standard and will dominate in the server market and slowly take over in the Unix workstation market. Therefore, many CAD/CAM packages will be porting to Linux in the next couple of years to cover the shrinking percentage of the market that will stay in the Unix world."

Chris Christopher, Hewlett-Packard:
"It really depends upon the application that the engineer works with the most. For example, simple CAD applications have already been ported to Windows, and engineers are using these applications without any performance degradation. In fact, in many cases ISVs have added features/functionalities to the application and improved application performance thanks, in large part, to the processor improvements from Intel."

"However, for engineers using EDA applications, their immediate future is most decidedly still Unix. Engineers performing analysis and simulation tasks are showing a keen interest in Linux-on-Intel. In fact, at HP we are seeing a number of customers requesting Linux clusters."

"Our customers are telling us that both HP-UX and Linux will remain an integral part of the engineering landscape because of their advantages in reliability, scalability, and capability."

Mitch Free, ManufacturingQuote.com:
"Linux will eventually replace Unix, but it will not replace Windows as a de facto standard in the engineering environment. While Linux offers advantages over Windows for engineering applications, those advantages do not present a business case for software developers to make the investment to develop their code to run under Linux."

Complete Story

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