What Differentiates Linux from Windows?

tail.man sent in a Linux Insider piece about the difference between Linux and Windows. Quoting the synopsis "So, what's really the difference between a Unix variant like Linux and any Windows OS? It's that Microsoft reacts to marketing pressure to make design decisions favoring running a few processes faster but then finds itself forced first to layer in backward compatibility and then to engage in a patch-and-kludge upgrade process until the code becomes so bloated, slow and unreliable that wholesale replacement is again called for."

Comments

Re:It's simple.

[ranolen]

Yes, but at least it comes out with the updates it needs in a reasonable time. With linux you are depending on a bunch of people sitting in their garage, to come out with something that "may" work. At lease with MS there is responsibility in what they write.

Re:It's simple.

[Xabraxas]

For non-trivial things, though, I have scads of problems just like the grandparent. He's right: the key difference between Windows and Linux is ease of hardware and software installation. Time and again I have problems with dependencies and searching down different versions of this or that library, or circular reference dependency problems such as MySQL needs Perl which needs MySQL-DBI which can't be installed without MySQL. Or trying to get a real video card working, and having XFree ask you 100 questions about your monitor frequencies, only to finally barf to text mode when it's show time.

That's not Linux's fault. It's the shitty distro you are using.