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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."
Murphy writes that "For example, cost is usually important in business only if the products being compared are otherwise very similar." I work in education and cost is everything. I can really say that my Linux OS machines (running the K12LTSP) are equal to my Windows 2K/XP machines but cost is huge. I can literally put a lab in my classroom using Linux, I'd have to settle for a couple of PC's at best under the commercial software regime.
Despite conventional wisdom and some articles to the contrary, sometimes complete ground-up software rewrites are necessary. Windows 2003 is - for my money - one of the best server systems around. Its stability is equal to the linux servers I run, and finally it installs completely locked down.
Windows 2003 wouldn't be possible if 90% of its codebase was from the WinNT 3.1 kernel.
Even Macs - OSX is so completely different than OS9 that they can't even be compared fairly. OS9 was dead in the water before it came out - the rewrite of the OS (albeit on the BSD kernel) was necessary to allow Mac to continue to compete at all.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
.. the gap is closing between the two in terms of usability and stability - in BOTH DIRECTIONS. this is hardly ever mentioned, but Windows has improved BIG TIME since 95/98/ME -> If you have used 2003 you will note the speed is much improved over older versions as is the stability. Now before you brand me a Redmond freak, I've been a linux user for 5 years (since I was 12) and will be forever, but I can hardly help noticing that everyone thinks Linux is gaining on Windows, when in fact Windows is also gaining on Linux
just my 2 pence
Tim
tim
Boils down to something like this.
Windows: easy to configure, easy to break
Linux: difficult to configure, difficult to break
Don't get me wrong, I use both, its an apples to oranges comparison. The question is what do you want to do with it? A MS firewall is unconsiderable, but so is the thought of putting Linux on my sisters desktop.
It's like driving a car you're not accostumed to every day. It's just different.
... I'm a huge Linux fan, but I also use windows. (Often tagged, albeit incorrectly, as a 'Microsoft Hater'). Anyhow, my point... what happens when someone open sources windows? Or, more specifically, comes up with an Open Source Windows clone?
But to be slightly OT...
It sort of reminds me of something
I've always wanted to write a book talking about how the two camps actually need each other. Microsoft would have more to fear from an open source windows variant than any threat Linux could ever bring.
FLR
My dad (a reasonable, intelligent, only semi-computer-literate man) asked me this exact question the other day. The best I could give him was that Linux is a hobby OS and Windows is an OS driven by business interests. That gives pluses and minuses to each of them. Dad and I talked about the good and the bad; obvious things like, security issues, lock-in, consistency across apps, integration, stability. We agreed that Linux could really benefit from some of the aspects of Windows, such as centralization and consistency across the UI in every app. We also agreed that Windows could benefit from many things Linux has, such as increased peer review, freedom (beer and speech), and community. In the end, he wasn't interested in switching to Linux or anything, but he hoped that its influence was going to get Microsoft off their rear ends and improve their product. I think whichever OS can meet the other in the middle--with a balance of security, usability, and power--will win the long-term battle.
Ugh, there have been far far far too many MS-bashing linux-is-so-great posts on /. recently... yes, Windows may have flaws, but it has good points too people. At least pretend to present a balanced view, lest the Linux community comes to be seen as the mad fanatics Mac users are.
It turns people off Macs, and it can do the same for Linux.
Windows still has an edge in simplicity as far as installing apps. Folks who swear by apt (for RPM) do have to realize you still need to deal with adding repositories to sources.list and dealing with GPG signatures.
OTOH, that simplicity in installing apps makes Windows extremely vulnerable as well. Doesn't take much effort to run/install anything off the Internet. Spyware can cling onto your system without much consent at all.
That brings up the major difference I've seen so far. Worms, Viruses, Trojans, Keyloggers, and other forms of malware don't seem to find their way into my Linux machine. The rest of my family who run Windows, though, get infected too many times for my liking.
Is that because most Linux users know to watch out for those types of things while Windows users can be painted with the "AOLer" stereotype? That's probably a factor. But so is the general architecture of not putting yourself in danger for the sake of convenience -- by running mail programs and browsers with enough privs to bork a system.
Cheaper, more secure, and absolutely transparent. Many thanks to everyone who makes OSS possible -- from the programmers and QA testers to the advocacy groups and spokespeople. (and the large corporations backing Open Source)
This article articulates very well the opinion I've come to hold, since being network and sys admin for about 300 Solaris and 2 or 300 NT machines for about 4 years.
My point of contention is that Microsoft built its legacy on home users, and "amatuer" (for lack of a better adjective) operating systems. Sun, HP and the other enterprise OS companies built it for business. I pitty anyone who relies on M$ servers for their bread and butter. I was talking to a DB manager for a M$ shop, that manages 7 terabytes of data. I complained how we had to bounce Oracle about once a month, and it was always the middleware failing. He laughed, and said, "We have to reboot the M$ DB _daily_ and reboot the whole machine". We only had to restart the middleware processes (e.g. ps -ef | grep middlware....kill ...and the processes would automatically kick back off) and were back up and running in seconds, without affecting other DB processes on the box running.
This speaks volumes.
Those who don't know any better will keep their opinions for their own camp (either M$ or *nix) and those who've been on both sides are probably too busy to weigh in here anyway. (I'm out of it now, so I have more time :-)
John
The rest of it, the "Lunix never crashes because of open-source!" I don't especially buy into.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Actually, my experience has been that the driver set for Linux is in *some* ways more comprehensive than Windows. Case in point: I have a SCSI scanner that simply didn't work at all on a Windows 2000/XP box as no drivers were available. I put the card and scanner on a Red Had Fedora box and it auto detected it right away. I have had the same experience with a couple of NICs and a printer. However, I am not an advocate of a single platform school. My current classroom setup is two Windows XP boxes (two I brought from home) and 10 Linux thin clients. I have equipment plugged into both, including equipment donated from the community (in some cases, the community is my garage). Thanks for your thoughts!
i do know that when ever i install windows i have to track down drivers for sound devices, video and network card. this has happened EVERY windows install i have done. this is on pcs made by the main pre-builts such as hp, compaq, dell,...etc i do know that as stated in an earlier post the only drivers i had to install for my slackware install is my NVidia drivers. and the only compatablity i ensure is that i dont buy winmodems, but this may be because i dont buy modems
- Insert a floppy into a Windows machine.
- Start up Word and type up whatever.
- "Save as..." to the floppy drive.
- With your document still up and running in Word, remove the floppy and replace with another, different floppy, maybe one with some important files on it.
- "Save" (not "Save as..", just "Save") and see what happens.
You may not have to "mount" and "unmount" but it's not like these operations don't exist in Windows. The difference is that Windows will hide this operation from the user, much like "automount" tries to do on Linux. Another difference is that because the operation is hidden, users aren't aware it's an issue. I work in a campus lab, and just yesterday one of the profs did this exact sequence of steps and lost alot of work... oops.My comment is mostly for the beanie-heads who are newer to Slashdot than us dyed-in-the-keyboard vets of many computers, so forgive me by driving home the obvious.
An operating system is an operating system is an operating system is an operating system. It's only purpose is to provide you, the user, a human-readable interface and control system for the computer's hardware and software.
How Linux, other UNIXen, and Windows handle this, however, is the big question to me when someone asks me the question that the article posed.
Applications designed for Windows are just that--developers typically use programming tools that create apps which are hardware-and-operating-system-specific. Barring an emulator such as Virtual PC (funny, that's owned now by Microsoft, too), Windows applications simply will not operate unless it has a conventional Intel-style PC hardware architecture running a specific flavor of Windows. And nope, your 16-bit Windows apps will likely break in Windows XP, so you have to hunt and peck for the app that works in the OS you have.
The UNIX family has things differently. UNIX-family applications are frequently hardware-agnostic and non-operating system-specific. You could be running Solaris, or FreeBSD, or Mandrake, or SuSE, or Darwin, or Mac OS X--generally, the code just works. (Plenty of exceptions, like OpenOffice ports to Mac OS X, but a version does work now in OS X's X11 environment, to take an example.)
Where you would walk into a computer store to buy Windows software, a *NIX user could download the source code for an application and compile it, or build it to work for their particular operating system and platform. Of course, we could buy the source code from a store as well, or the binaries for our platform, if a software maker distributed most of the UNIX software in that format. Currently, the inability of a home Linux user to visit CompUSA for the latest UNIX application is among the greatest challenges to *NIX as a popular home desktop OS (Mac OS X's inroads notwithstanding).
Nevertheless, I can download most BSD and many UNIX and Linux source code from my Mac OS X (BSD variant) workstations, compile it, and use it, without problem or complant. Windows users generally aren't compiling squat--they have to buy or find the already-assembled binaries that run within Windows--and pray that those versions of the binaries were compiled with their Windows version (and patch version, and service pack version) in mind.
The best example of a well-written application that doesn't particularly care about platform (at least in terms of its data files--binaries must still be obtained) is BioWare's Neverwinter Nights game series. It works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. While the two expansion packs for the original game haven't yet been released in an official Mac version yet, because BioWare designed the game's data to be platform-agnostic, many impatient Mac users have figured out. without a lot of hassle, how to install the game expansions using the Linux versions of the games.
Windows is a proprietary operating system, and any applications written for it feed into that mold. The UNIX world is literally open in its design and flexibility. Don't confuse "open" for "Open Source," however--that's another (related) story.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Yes, in Linux it's either it works out of the box, you download and COMPILE something and it works well thereafter, or it just doesn't work at all.
...but that's just because it is in the manufacturer's interest to support windows in some way or another. Even if the support for your version of windows is pretty crappy.
:( I was a little peeved, but managed to figure out how to get it working by downloading some rather new drivers and compiling, but that's kind of a rare case... then there is the printer I bought last year BECAUSE OF THE PENGUIN ON THE BOX! (can you tell I'm still peeved about that one?) ...a Lexmark Z55, again it came with drivers that only work in a handful of Linux versions and on the website they don't even provide the option to get drivers that are generic.. after fighting with it for a long time I bought an HP printer and it worked out of the box, no driver install needed (just emerge cups on my gentoo box and away I went.)
In windows there are many more levels, but fewer pieces of hardware in the Just doesn't work at all category.
I remember buying a server once that was designed for Linux use and trying to upgrade from Mandrake 7.2 to 8.0 I think it was, and finding that the driver for the disk controller only existed in binary form on the install disks and that only worked with the kernels in Redhat 6.2
On the same token, try administering a Windows Active Directory server when all you've ever known is *nix administration. At the hosting company I used to work at, I ended up installing Cygwin and wrote a bunch of bash scripts that called upon VBScripts to handle most common administrative tasks to make things easier for the Linix admins that had no clue about Windows.
Personally, I think they were not "getting" it on purpose so they wouldn't have to work on the Windows systems. They punished me by making me fix all of those problems (or at least stabilizing them so they would at least keep running).
Although I can handle both Linux and Windows quite well, throw me in front of a Mac and I feel like a blithering idiot.
The difference between linux and windows is that the former has tons of useful POSIX utilities like sed, grep, wc, tr, xargs... and I know how to use them, and do so almost every day. There's probably a way to do that sort of thing in windows, but I haven't a clue how.
*Practically* speaking, that's a crap argument. I haven't seen any linux distros installing libc5 support by default recently. Which means old libc5 apps won't run (unless they happened to be statically linked). I even seem to recall some pain in the glibc 2.0->2.1 transition. Or how about trying to install some older rpms on a shiny new distribution? It's about a 50-50 shot that it works.
Microsoft has to rewrite large portions of windows code to take on new features, which make it incompatible with older software.
The larger problem is that backwards compatability seems to be directly proportional to bloat. Microsoft's problem is that since they aren't a "distribution" per se, they can't even attempt to fix all your executables to use new libraries as they're developed. And then when they (finally) remove or fix obsolete/broken libraries anyway, shit breaks. Then they get blamed for 'intentionally' breaking other vendors' programs. It isn't actually their fault (..sometimes).
Really, I always thought MS bent over backwards to err on the side of "bloat" whenever possible. Which is why you have the DOS virtual machine and the win16 API etc.
To the login prompt is 42 seconds. After the login prompt is about one minute 12 seconds, but not really windows fault, it has to update my files with server using active directory remote profiles, load up a real time virus scanner, load all of my network drives, load my calendar, and acrotray which is for the full version of adobe acrobat 6. I also offer that this build is only 2 months old, because I recently got this computer as an upgrade to a Pentium 3 1133. I built it myself, and could give you an exact part listing, but as for the OS install, I didn't do anything special, formatted the whole drive as one partition, ran through the install, ran all the updates, and added the system to the domain. ??? Works fantastic. and I have all XP machines here and ussually if we have a problem it when XP has to deal with running a program designed for like windows 95. and still uses hard coded LPTs for printing purposes. But other than that, I run a clean network, I do spam and virus detection at the email server, preventing worms from getting opened in email. And all in all, few problems.
This isn't a troll, I am just seriously tired of this constant anti windows shit, I think it's mostly based on the older OSs NT, and 98, but since 2000 I feel they have been doing a superb job, and when I bought XP pro moving from 2000 I really liked the upgrade.
I used to use a SGI for autocad, but then we moved to dual Proc Dells, and I really liked it. I do still use Linux, for my e-mail, and web server at home, but only because I didn't want to buy 2000 server, and I thought Linux works well as a server. Personally I used it as a desktop for years, but constant kernel updates, and having to compile every damn thing before I could use it, turned me off. THe linux community should learn to offer binary executables and source because I simply just don't like the hassle of the extra step.
Here comes the mod down. and there is nothing I can do about it. People hate me for my opinion, but I can't be like most of the people here, claim to hate windows and promote linux, but secretly use XP all the time.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
These are the guys that were publishing strangely pro-SCO articles DESPITE the increasing amount of bovine feces they'd been spewing about IBM conspiracies.
Now this article. The tagline paragraph atop the article tips me off that it isn't even PRETENDING to be objective. The article feels like an over-the-top attempt to compensate for kissing SCO's ass a week ago. There are several things I could call this article--journalism is not one of them. The whole publication appears extremely contrived. I wouldn't listen to a single word they publish.
Do not read LinuxInsider.
--
having to compile every damn thing before I could use it, turned me off. THe linux community should learn to offer binary executables and source because I simply just don't like the hassle of the extra step.
What are you blethering about? Provision of binary executables is the purpose of GNU/Linux distributions.
I have not run Windows at home for about five years, and I don't miss it in the slightest. I have a server for NFS, web, mail and other bits and bobs. I have an IBM Thinkpad which is my main work horse. I have an ancient Toshiba Libretto hooked up to my amplifier for playing music.
All of these run Debian. I can't remember the last thing I had to compile by hand; Debian has so many packages prebuilt that I rarely have to build something myself. Either it's already there, or something else is there that does the same job.
If I do need to compile somthing, Debian ensures I don't end up in dependency hell because almost all Free libraries are packaged. I grant you - RedHat used to be a pain. Trying to compile an up-to-date Gnome 1.0 for RedHat 5.1 was the last straw that switched me over to a distro built by it's users. But I'm pretty sure RedHat is much better these days anyway.
My day job desktop is Windows NT 4.0 SP6 and I get through the day but it can hardly be called convenient. It's so lowest-common-dominator that I end up installing all sorts of utilities that are missed out in the shipped OS. I fear Windows XP because I don't want to work in a cartoon.
And finally, I bathe in the warmth of the freedom of GNU/Linux. I don't have to invoke it much, but I know that if I do have to, I can get the source and fix it. Thanks Linus, RMS, et al.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
More precisely, OS is the tertiary product. Their primary product is a solid, supported, consistent API to attract and retain developers. The secondary product is a slick user interface for their desktop API.
In all practial aspects, for most people Linux is a Unix-like environment first, an OS second, and any semblence of a desktop API or slick desktop environment is not really all that important.
Microsoft could sell Win32 on Linux without too much pain... it would not be the first time they changed OSes for their environment.