Oh, absolutely, fair point. I used linux exclusively on the desktop from 95-02.
Even commercially; I worked at a decent-sized digital services company in 99-02 that, from the day I started, had 2 ALR 6x6 pentium pro machines as database servers (6 proc, 6 hot swap drive bays). When they crashed, our main issues were with really long-running `fsck` because journaling filesystems were not a thing.
All the app servers were white label intel boxes. We had issues, sure -- the one that comes to mind chiefly is that we were doing IP-based virtual hosting (I don't think name-based virtual hosting was a thing yet), and Linux seemed to get unstable and randomly drop the virtual interfaces once you exceeded maybe a few hundred per NIC, and you'd have to restart the i/f to fix it. I don't think these were behind LBs yet, but I can't really remember.
All that stuff was on RedHat, the first time of 2 or 3 times that Redhat went through the v7 -> v8 -> v9 period :)
Even in much later years (eg, 2008-ish), I remember that too many vendors (HP, Dell, etc) would ship these prosumer grade RAID cards that absolutely fell over (locked up) at sustained high util %. You could (probably correctly) argue that was because we didn't pony up for the true high-end x86 hardware, but the fact that enterprise server companies shipped this stuff at all meant it made the x86 option look less robust compared to the big iron.
Even commercially; I worked at a decent-sized digital services company in 99-02 that, from the day I started, had 2 ALR 6x6 pentium pro machines as database servers (6 proc, 6 hot swap drive bays). When they crashed, our main issues were with really long-running `fsck` because journaling filesystems were not a thing.
All the app servers were white label intel boxes. We had issues, sure -- the one that comes to mind chiefly is that we were doing IP-based virtual hosting (I don't think name-based virtual hosting was a thing yet), and Linux seemed to get unstable and randomly drop the virtual interfaces once you exceeded maybe a few hundred per NIC, and you'd have to restart the i/f to fix it. I don't think these were behind LBs yet, but I can't really remember.
All that stuff was on RedHat, the first time of 2 or 3 times that Redhat went through the v7 -> v8 -> v9 period :)
Even in much later years (eg, 2008-ish), I remember that too many vendors (HP, Dell, etc) would ship these prosumer grade RAID cards that absolutely fell over (locked up) at sustained high util %. You could (probably correctly) argue that was because we didn't pony up for the true high-end x86 hardware, but the fact that enterprise server companies shipped this stuff at all meant it made the x86 option look less robust compared to the big iron.