What is the best Windows installer, either open-source or less than $1K, that supports MSI, has a decent GUI, supports upgrades and has a quick learning curve?
After having tested several ones I came to the conclusion that there is no Installer that fits your criteria. We have thus switched to WiX. There is a WiX-Editor that let's you do some changes in a sort of GUI but WiX was and is a lot of code writing. It produces clean MSI-Installers that are very much liked by system engineers on the client side.
WiX is free but has a long learning curve (calculate 2 weeks until you have the first working MSI for an average complex installer).
Learn what your peers think about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2023.
Hi community,
I am currently looking for an alternative product for SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers. Which OS solution would you recommend and why?
Thank you for your help.
Have you looked at Rocky Linux? Among the Enterprise Linux variants, it seems to be capturing the largest share of the market. (check out the growth chart at https://ciq.co/products/rocky-...) It's completely free, but if you want commercial support, you can get it through Rocky's primary sponsor CIQ.
We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for our organization’s OS.
RHEL is a very good and stable operating system that does not require a lot of maintenance. You just deploy it and it runs. The initial setup is straightforward. With RHEL, the setup is easy since you have a GUI, so any Windows-based user is going to be able to do it. You can also run deployments with scripting.
RHEL enables us to deploy our current applications and merge our workloads across physical hardware and virtual machines. When we do this, virtualization and physical hardware remain unchanged. Deploying to the cloud depends on the platform we use, but it is mostly consistent as well. RHEL is pretty much the standard now. Whether we go to Rackspace, Amazon, Azure, or even Microsoft, they are all supporting RHEL distribution.
Red Hat is incredible at all infrastructure tasks. For example, when it comes to web servers, Red Hat is excellent for setting up and managing web servers or databases. It also does a very good job for proxies. If you want your system to run with minimal user interaction, Red Hat is definitely the solution you need.
Below are some of the benefits RHEL offers:
Integration: We were able to easily integrate it with our existing infrastructure, which was very helpful for us. When compared to competing operating systems, we see that RHEL is much simpler to deploy in our environment. This is also due to the fact that we can connect all of our RHEL instances together and easily push out new content. We do this by using RHEL Satellite, which is the patching and lifecycle management application.
Monitoring: We like using the tracing and monitoring tools that RHEL offers. They provide us with a large number of metrics, and we utilize these tools to track the usage of our applications. When we use these tools, the performance of the OS is not impacted at all.
Scalability: It is unbeatable in terms of scalability. With RHEL Satellite, scaling up and down is extremely easy for us. I can scale hundreds of identical servers with the same configuration and set them all up with the push of a button.
Excellent support: The technical support offered by Red Hat is superior. The support team really pays attention to their customers. It is unusual to encounter a support person who doesn't seem to know what they are doing, and if it happens, it doesn't take very long to get the issue escalated to somebody else who can help out. I would rate the support as 10 out of 10.
The only thing I don't like about Red Hat is that every time we upgrade, we have to reboot. There are patches just about every month, and you are then forced to reboot your system. Fortunately, it's a single reboot, so it’s not too bad.
All in all, this is a very powerful and stable solution. I rate it a nine out of ten.
IT Consultant at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
Oct 3, 2022
We use all sorts of operating systems as our technical teams and applications are diverse. We have Linux (RHEL for mission-critical applications, Oracle Linux, Old applications on Centos, and numerous Windows server operating systems for Microsoft applications.
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@Netanya Carmi,This is an insightful article.
But in my opinion, Rocky Linux (as a potential successor) of CentOS, will be the next big thing in the open-source world, as already many solutions are supporting it though only the BETA version for now.
Still, your article is quite a heads up. Thanks!
I too would like to see this list expand to all of the relevant Linux distributions. I'm really surprised to see Oracle Linux on here and not see Rocky or Alma. As is shown in this chart generated from data provided by the Fedora project: https://rocky-stats.tiuxo.com/static/el_by_distro_line.png
Rocky and Alma are far more relevant and widely used than Oracle.
it depends on whether you want GUI or a command line.
Only command line wix but it is not user-friendly.
GUI installers are "install aware" & "Inno Setp".
After having tested several ones I came to the conclusion that there is no Installer that fits your criteria. We have thus switched to WiX. There is a WiX-Editor that let's you do some changes in a sort of GUI but WiX was and is a lot of code writing. It produces clean MSI-Installers that are very much liked by system engineers on the client side.
WiX is free but has a long learning curve (calculate 2 weeks until you have the first working MSI for an average complex installer).