Salt is missing templates, the ability to use higher level programming language and all the environment/roles that I find the most powerful part of Chef.
You are wrong on all counts here. Salt supports Jinja2 template engine, so you can template your states [1]. You define custom states in python [2]. In the root configuration file (top.sls) you target configuration based on host name, grains (machine specific information) [3].
jinja2 and mako are supported, and you can even write your own renderer without much effort if a templating language is not supported.
There's even a renderer for pure python, allowing one to write config files in python for more control and flexibility.
One wonders if you've ever actually tried Salt. It really is OK to have an approach of: "I like Chef and it works for me." More power to you. Everyone should use the tool that works for them.
I stopped at entering my name, company and position. Why can't I try this out anonymously? The stakes are too high for most people to willy nilly add their personal info to a conduit for recruiters.
We don't share your information with recruiters, that's part of the proposition as we are a conduit to companies that you decide who to share your information with.
We match jobs to your goals AND to your relevant experience, if we didn't collect information about who you are we couldn't accurately do our part.
Even a Joyent tech admits Ubuntu is a more pleasant experience. Thought this was interesting, but all his points are not isolated to the desktop experience. Pretty much all the reasons he switched to linux affect the building and maintenance of servers too. I think it just boils down to community support.
I will read the article later, when I have more time, but many geeks that only know Linux and eventually BSD, have no idea how painful commercial UNIX systems can be.
Several of our customers have HP-UX systems that look like plain System V systems straight out of the 70's.
That was my first response to Linux when I was first trying it out. Back in the mid 1990s.
At the userland level especially, it didn't suck, and (with the GNU userland, windowmanagers, etc.), in fact, sucked radically less than stock commercial Unices I'd been using at the time (Sun, HP, AT&T, Data General, BSD).
The situation's only gotten much, much better.
I'll occasionally find myself in situations where I'm connecting to commercial Unix boxes (was a semi-recent shop where a fair number of staff still ran CDE desktops), and, really, it's painful. Doable, but painful.
Sure HP/UX and friends always were terrible, but in 1995 I actually failed in love with Unix thanks to IRIX. IRIX really had a nice UI, easy to use management interfaces, powerful multimedia capabilities. Only installing anew it was bringing me back to the stone age (particularly the partitioning part, "inst" package manager was actually decent).
Commercial systems operate under constraints that Linux didn't have until recently, such as needing to maintain backwards compatibility. This went all the way from not changing the interface for people who used workstations for highly skilled works but were not "geeks" (e.g. CAD guys), to sticking with old shells (e.g. Sun stuck with ksh long after Linux had bash). Witness the furore over the GNOME team changing things a couple of weeks ago...
