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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.
MicroSoft makes an OS to make money, Linux is designed to be an effective OS
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
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
So by the metric they care about, Microsoft is an effective OS.
dtg
The truth is an offense, but not a sin.------R. N. Marley
.. 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
I know somewhat offtopic... but the article link crashed Moz here for me.. anyone else get that? Ver 1.5
I'll AOL that.
Actually, this is a good opportunity to pinpoint all those Internet Exploder users within the slashdot community and excommunicate them once and for all.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
yea! The only drivers I ever have to install are the nvidia video drivers linux. For the most part has all my drivers and the only reason for the nvidia drivers is so I can have gl support, otherwise I could just use it out of the box without the installation of drivers.
Although no self-respecting /.er wants to admit, there is a steeper learning curve to using Linux than Windows. How much more steep is debatable. There also is a tendency for closed-minded people who want to do as little thinking as possible to choose Windows, even though it paves the way for migraines later.
My two cents, be gentle with the flames. Ah heck, I'll post anonymously, so flame on!!!!
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.
Oh, and for those who don't get this or the parent: ..."
On one hand, we have an O/S that works with X86, once worked with one other architecture, and has gone nowhere else.
On the other hand, we have an O/S that works with X86, and now works on everything from calculators and old gaming consoles to some of the largest supercomputing clusters in the world.
Anybody who says that Linux isn't inherently more robust and flexible at the critical core areas is living their life under a rock.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
The points in the article (and others) also reflect the fact that Unix variants came about during an era of big expensive hardware and timesharing versus small cheap (relatively) hardware and a single operator. These categories can also be looked at as Unix favoring "enterprise" tasks and Windows favoring "personal" tasks. The interesting part is that both camps are trying to became more attractive to the other's "side"; i.e. Windows han been targeting the infrastructural role while Unix variants are warming up to the desktop.
Granted, this analysis is a little superficial but I think it's true in a broad sense.
While he was in New York on location for Bronco Billy (1980), Clint Eastwood agreed to a television interview. His host, somewhat hostile, began by defining a Clint Eastwood picture as a violent, ruthless, lawless, and bloody piece of mayhem, and then asked Eastwood himself to define a Clint Eastwood picture.
"To me," said Eastwood calmly, "what a Clint Eastwood picture is, is one that I'm in."
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Windows on the other hand is sterile and ferile. No one is personally involved in one particular aspect (at least for very long, comparitively speaking.) So you get mountains of code that, once written, are rarely re-thought. They work, they go through testing, and until some new function is needed for it or some vulnerability found, never given a second thought.
Think Bit Rot.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
It's still in development, but you can boot it and run some programs on it already.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
SCO owns the code to Linux
any questions? /puts on flamesuit/
Maybe I read the article wrong, but it didn't state Linux was better, it just stated things that differed. It had multiple Unix type OS's Solaris, Linux, BSD and Mach kernels in the article.
The point that did come up multiple times, Microsoft has to rewrite large portions of windows code to take on new features, which make it incompatible with older software. While Unix based OS's can run older versions of software.
Linux (or BSD/etc) is more modular and can build on newer, better OS implementations. Paging file techniques, VM engines, OS Schedulers, etc.
It's more of a design philosophy article.
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)
Well, here's my opinion, anyway.
The Unix philosophy: build tools which do one or a few things very well (and are trivial to develop, debug, and maintain) and build upon them.
I have yet to detect anything resembling a philosophy in the 'other' place. It seems to be build a single big-ass swiss army knife application (which doesn't seem to do anything very well).
Ads are broken.
Close. Microsoft makes something which runs like and O/S, but includes massive amounts of code for things you may never use, but fill up the disk and memory anyway. It's like the joke that inside every fat person is a skinny person trying to get out, but with Windows there's a bloated pile of software smothering an operating system.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
Innovative? I'd have to say Linux's strength is that it isn't innovative in its design. It instead replicates tried and accepted OS paradigms. It's monolithic (although that's changing. Although it definitely isn't a microkernel like OSX or Hurd), it eschews object orientated programming, etc. OTOH NT and all of its derivatives do try to absorb some of those features; exponentially increasing its complexity (and resulting in all of those pitfalls). In some ways its a 16 part screwdriver.
Innovation in technology isn't necessarily a great thing. For every Macintosh you have your NeXT. Heck, even the Mac was just derivative of PARC's work. Linux plays it conservative and just does what it does.
What is music when you despise all sound?
" MicroSoft makes an OS to make money, Linux is designed to be an effective OS"
Why do you assume making money and making an effective OS are mutually exclusive?
Vote for Pedro
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.
Many things are wonderful and easy in Linux, but installing hardware and software is 50 times as difficult in Linux as it is in Windows.
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.
1. You'd think a journalist could write a more coherent and jargon-free paragraph, but maybe that's just me?
2. Asking what Windows vs. *nix does different is too broad. You can ask this question literally forver - if you keep abstracting down further and futher. Once again, vague journalism.
3. Ok, you can flame me (as if I would deny you that) but I don't think Linux zealots are in any position to say that windows is any less bloated than Linux. Mandrake 10.0 community from just yesterday's is 2.1 gigabytes (re: torrent), most of which is unnecessary for 95% use. Suppose I manage to start the install from CD1 without having CD2 or CD3, well I *hope* there's not a package required by default that is on CD2 or CD3.
4. Microsoft runs a few processes faster and others slower? I think he needs to define what he means by processes. Because I dont think he's using the same terminology as the rest of us when we say 'process'. Once again, too vague.
until the code becomes so bloated, slow and unreliable
5. Is the code bloated, or are the features bloated? Or are the features bloated and the code that composes those features bloated? Once again, too much abstraction.
I think I'll stop here.
Depends on what your definition of average user is. We have 20 Linux desktops where I work. We went straight from Windows to Linux. These are not tech people, they are customer service and sales reps for a mail order company. These people had no problem learning the new system. That was our definition of the average user.
The focus needs to be on business use - once everyone is using it at work, the home users will follow. Linux is perfect for business - your secretary or sales rep shouldn't be installing hardware or upgrading apps anyway. That should be the responsibility of the IT personnel.
On the other hand, my ex girlfriend sent me a screensaver she made with photos and video clips on Mac OSX (another unix varient), and lemme tell ya, she is no 1337 "power user". As outrageous as it sounds, I sometimes I think we give Windows a little too much credit in the usability department.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
" ... Given that one is clearly not the same as the other, the real question is, "Why is making money and making an effective OS the same?" ..."
The article speaks quite a bit about how Microsoft if forced to build in back-compatibility in an inefficient manner. Every OS has to deal with back-compatibility to a certain extent, but consider how much more important it is to a company like Microsoft.
They have a business model that could easily be described as based on market share with both business users and home users "feeding" each other's compatibility needs. The business user many be more reluctant to upgrade than the home user because reliability, transition problems and cost have different consequences for both types, yet both have large numbers of current and legacy OS users.
Consider Linux. Upgrade issues remain, but cost is negligible with home users and can be attractive (or not; depends on too many things) to business users as well. However the OS itself (with the more modern code) is available and access to the software itself is not a significant cost issue. Thus, no absolute need for "kludges" to keep older OS's ( or more typically older paid programs from other vendors) running, while a significant number of truly ancient CPUs can also run an effective, compatible "family" *NIX Operating System and necessary software.
Microsoft got where it is on marketshare; it's maintaining it's current income on marketshare, and it pegs it's future on marketshare. It drives every effort from code to sales to lobbying. That marketshare requires users to implicitly agree to paid upgrades of MS and third party software.
Although a given Linux distro does have marketshare interests, a user that switches to a competitive Linux distro is not the end of the world; potential new users far exceed current users, the user hasn't really changed his way of working, and hasn't invested in new hardware. He's still there for future growth.
I think the cost of upgrading of the two OS's plays a significant role in the way they are coded, designed, and implemented. Linux advocates may be just a little blind to it, because it's not a consideration that drives the development process; Microsoft's corporate coders can never lose sight of it, and it does drive the code, design, and implementation.
But the real point: why the eff should you have to have "scheduled reboots" at all?! YOU SHOULDN'T.
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.
My network card drivers were source only, my drivers I recieved for my sound card were source I had to compile and then it didn't support digital audio, Ummm...actually only a few things didn't come as source.
And if you haven't run windows in 5 years, you really wouldn't miss it, because you can't even comprehend how far its come.
That's like saying, I had a 386PC it wasn't very fast so I am sticking to my Dual Processor G5, it's much faster. Your comparing oranges, to old apples, you bought 4 years ago. Maybe you should try a nice K7 Athlon system running XP, even from 2000 to XP, the OS came a long way.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you