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Linux vs. Windows: What's The Difference?
underpar writes "This zdnet article covering Microsoft's Tech Ed conference quotes one of the speakers, Mark Russinovich, as saying that Linux is becoming more and more like Windows. He cites many examples of where Linux 'copies' Windows and other operating systems. He says the only current difference is 'how windowing is handled.'"
The article is talking about the Linux KERNEL not the Gnu/Linux system. He's comparing the linux kernel and the windows kernel, and the difference betweent he two with regards to windowing systems is that Windows has windowing operations in the kernel, whereas Linus has it in unser space.
Just a little summary for people too impatient to read the article..
With Linux (or BSD), I'm not forced into running a GUI on a server. All services and subsystems are configurable via whatever text editor I find handy. Installing software (except perhaps kernels) doesn't require rebooting the system.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
There are many compilers out there for many languages. Other then VC++ I cant think of any language that dosn't have a free compiler out there for Windows.
"your choice of how your desktop environment looks"
There are so many desktop replacments/customizers out for windows I wouldn't even know where to start.
"games, not just freecell and solitaire"
Are you REALY trying to claim that there are more freeware games out for Linux then for Windows? Even the most basic of searches will prove this wrong.
"real networking tools, such as nmap, a variety of firewalls, heck the list is too long to begin here"
Most of them are available for windows.
"a powerful command prompt for expert users"
Ok, whats the diference between the BASH/TCSH/etc shell on Linux and the same shell on Windows?
Everything you listed is just a download away. I fail to see the problem.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Spoken like a true flamethrower! IHBT, but I'll bite anyway. I just installed Mandrake 10 and I'm amazed at the usability -- it's really quite polished.
Drivers are slow to arrive mainly because nearly every single one requires someone to spend a month or two reverse-engineering some proprietary interface. But again, they're not really much of a problem anymore. There are still a few new-ish unsupported devices (the Centrino wireless cards are an example), but the windows compatibility layer takes care of that.
Who says you have to pay for Linux? Go download Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE (the FTP install works great), or even Gentoo or Debian. Same thing without the CDs, and maybe some licensed software.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Mark Russinov is the guy from wininternals who have some very cool utilities for windows - frequently mentioned in the microsoft knowledge base. If you're looking for windows utilities to show processes, logged on users, open file handles/mutexes etc., don't look no further.
/etc/ and ~/.somethingrc files can be quite daunting, but it's so much better than the registry in real life situations where things can go wrong and you want to edit stuff by hand or restore stuff, it's just not funny.
Having said that, the talk was about the kernel. Obviously the differences between a GNU/linux distribution and a Windows variant run very deep.
My pet peeve about windows is the registry. Sure, the staggering number of sometimes quite byzantine file formats of all those different
The biggest difference in the kernel would have to be security. Windows has a lot riding on their weird security system with it's SIDs and groups (which isn't enough to actually lock down your users, you need to use funky policies for that), whereas linux usually tries to get by with a simple uid/gid combination. Of course, if you'd want to, you could SELinux the kernel up beyond recognition, when it comes to security. (Try to do that on windows).
Also, printerdrivers don't run in Ring 0. They do on NT (and on windows 2000/XP as well, if you install old drivers. There's no warning or nothing. Yay.)
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Au contraire, mon frere.
Compilers - Microsoft just released free versions of their Visual Development environments. The VC command line compiler is also available. There are several other free compilers available as well.
Environment - ever heard of Litestep? Completely replaces Explorer. As well as BB4Win, ObjectDesktop and several others.
Games - there's all sorts of free games out there for windows. Try Google once in a while.
Networking tools - you are correct on that point.
Command Prompt - bash for windows, 4DOS/4NT/TakeCommand (non-free, but inexpensive). Both of those work within the constraints posed by the operating system. Bash mimics the Unix CLI, while 4DOS/4NT/Take Command provide extra functionality. Bash runs on top of cmd.exe, 4NT replaces it. Take Command is an alternate shell environment.
Do some research next time.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
in the old days, before windows even existed, there was X1(0|1) and most people commonly referred to it as X-windows.
We even thought it was plagiarism that Microsoft called their stuff "Windows"
But you must be of that young generation that grew up with windows so I guess it sounds strange to you.
Sincerely,
Grandpa
It's not exactly free; users of Windows 98 or ME must upgrade to Windows 2000 or Windows XP and possibly replace some peripherals that don't have proper WDM drivers.
Even then, it's not entirely free; dial-up users have to either commit to 12 months of MSN broadband for $360 or order a few CDs: Windows service packs, .NET Framework SDK and Redistributable, and the optimizing compiler included with VC++ Toolkit 2003.
Of course the solution set looks pretty small, after you've arbitrarily eliminated half of it. Nothing's stopping you from downloading Cygwin.
Sure you can.
Try Google. There are plenty of free games and skinning tools out there.
Microsoft doesn't put all this stuff on a CD and put it in the box with Windows, but that doesn't mean that these programs don't exist, or aren't useful. The only advantage GNU/Linux has is a distro that throws everything and KitchenSink 3.1, with sources, onto a DVD-ROM, like SuSE's Professional package. But that doesn't quite raise GNU/Linux to the level of superiority you suggest.
OTOH, the availability of source in the first place does give Linux quite a lift. :-)
This sig intentionally left blank.
Sure, they're free... but they're also Beta, and the licensing agreement says you can't publish any software you write with the environment. How does that compare to Linux... it doesn't.
I finally remembered where I read it: Windows POSIX Compliance.
Quote: "The POSIX subsystem included with Windows NT and Windows 2000 is not included with Windows XP Professional. A new subsystem supporting the broad functionality found on most UNIX systems beyond the POSIX.1 standard is shipped as part of Interix 2.2."
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
No regular expressions as such, it's all built into the command interpreter to do that though.
e.g echo %DATE% will return Fri 02/07/2004 (today anyway). If you only want the year then you do echo %DATE:~-4% (last four characters of the variable). If you want the day part only, you do echo %DATE:~4,2%. (two characters, starting at the fourth if you count from zero)
There's some quite flexible stuff built into cmd.exe if you're willing to look - some excellent for loops which are my favourite.
Can you ssh into your windows machine and restart the webserver with one simple command?
Uh, yes. Guess what, cygwin has a port of sshd! So yes, you can ssh into your machine. And if you're running Apache (also ported to Windows), you can do just what you described quite easily.
Can you totally modify the way your computer runs by writing shell scripts or modifying existing ones?
Elaborate.
I know I'll get modded troll for this, but here it goes...
.NET framework, and thus all of the compilers, preinstalled.
Microsoft now supplies free (as in beer) compilers for C#, VB.NET C++, J++, etc. with the dot net framework, which is available here. Longhorn will come with the
looking for a command prompt? Download Microsoft Unix tools for Windows. You'll get a better integrated variation on cygwin (based on one of the bsds)... it's free for download and works pretty well, particularly for things like grep and awk, which i couldn't live without.
Amazing magic tricks
I'm no big fan of windows, but it seems like you're not really knowledgeable about this stuff.
Can you ssh into your windows machine and restart the webserver with one simple command? Can you totally modify the way your computer runs by writing shell scripts or modifying existing ones?
In essence, yes... and yes. There are probably a few open ssh implementations that run as a service in Windows, just as there is an Apache service. Also of note, Microsoft released a POSIX / UNIX compatibility thing for NT/Win2K/XP (Unix services for Windows? I don't know what it's called.). It's only a few steps then, to get sshd up and running.
As for the web server... "iisreset" I think is the single command. I could be wrong, I don't have IIS installed on my home XP machine at the moment.
Lastly, Windows has a scripting host. You can do nearly everything with vbs. VB sucks as a language, but it's what they chose. I think that javascript might also be available. Anyways... there are scripts out there that let you shut down machines remotely, force the current user to log out, etc. etc. Of course, RPC has to be enabled, but it's all there. If there's an OLE, COM or ActiveX representation of whatever service or object that you wish to work with, you can access it through the scripting host.
I've had to work with Windows boxes at work, so I've had to learn a lot about everything. The security model is really interesting, and can be extremely *tight*, if you wish it to be. You can limit access to almost all OLE/COM/ActiveX objects to groups, you just need to find or develop the right tool.
Yes.... Mingw provides a bourne again shell for windows. Borland provides a free c++ compiler. Java is free (as in beer). Hell, even the MS .NET SDK is a free (as in beer) download, and Mono is a free (as in freedom) alternative that works in Windows.
I don't use a GUI to do much administration in Windows anymore, it just isn't my preferred method. Don't bitch about GUI being the *only* way to do it, since it most likely is not. I'd venture a guess to say that about 95% of everything that you can do with the GUI, you can do with the command line.
Now... creating symbolic and hard links in NTFS, and having the boot partition on a separate HD than your C:\Windows (C:\WINNT) directory, well those are options that you have to go without.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
links have always been part of NTFS, only there are a lackof tools to play with them.
XP has fsutil which you can use to create hard and soft links.
I'm not sure if it works with directories, for that you want a tool that creates 'junctions'.
Apparently the problem with using hardlinks was that programs weren't aware of them - some would always try to delete the file, some would have issues when recursively deleting, etc. I think MS must have put some checking or other work into the system to prevent problems, or they wouldn't have released the tool now.
Apples are crunchy.
Oranges are sweet.
Hmmmm.
You're comparing a system whose (original) philosophy is "provide basic tools needed by everyone and let people add additional capabilities with 3rd party applications" with one which is "provide everything anyone is ever likely to need on one set of CDs and give them a huge menu asking what to install at the start".
Of course the former (Windows) isn't going to be as capable as the latter (most Linux distributions) if you don't use it the way it's supposed to be used.
You might as well say you can't do word processing on Windows because WordPad's so shite.
Learn to live in the real world, will you?