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Windows Beat Unix, But it Won't Beat Linux

Onymous Hero writes "The amazing thing isn't that Windows beat the pants off Unix; it's that so many of the Unix companies survived until today. An article from eWeek looks at why Linux has been so successful where Unix failed." From the article: "While the Unix companies were busy ripping each other to shreds, Microsoft was smiling all the way to the bank. Because the Unix businesses couldn't settle on software development standards, ISVs (independent software vendors) had to write not a single application to get the whole Unix market, they had to write up to a half-dozen different versions. Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems? "

7 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. Make that three. by Xenex · · Score: 5, Informative
    From the article:
    "Twelve years ago, I oversaw a PC Magazine feature on Unix on Intel. My team and I reviewed at Unixes from Consensys, Dell, Interactive, SCO, Univel, Sun, and NeXT.

    ...

    Today, most of those companies are dead. Only two of them--Sun and SCO--are still in the Unix business.


    Make that three.

    NeXT are still in the Unix business.
    1. Re:Make that three. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      > Still? Apple's new to the UNIX business. They weren't in it 12 years ago.

      They were.

  2. fortunately its not so hard to write for Unix now by torpor · · Score: 5, Informative

    .. you just have to choose your API's/frameworks carefully.

    i mean, its not so difficult to set up a project that will cross-compile, use GTK+ or one of the other, smart, GUI libs, heck even SDL+libcairo works wonders, and then get it running on Solaris, Linux, *BSD's, OSX, and Windows .. as long as you're developing on Unix.

    but you certainly can't easily do it the other way around: develop on Windows, and port across. It can of course be done (with GTK+, etc), but its not as easy as it is to do under Unix.

    --
    ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
  3. Re:Linux wins because the OS isn't as important... by tomstdenis · · Score: 5, Informative

    At the OS level?

    Um *cough* POSIX.1 *cough*....

    My apps built and tested in Linux build in BSD routinely with little to no modification (occasionally I need to fix a makefile to use the build tools differently).

    Just because some people *can't* code a program without going directly to asm to make syscalls doesn't mean things like glibc [which has threads] and the POSIX.1 standards don't exist. In fact I once wrote a webserver for QNX that built out of the box for GNU/Linux because I used nothing but standard function calls.

    Stop being a poser. You don't need Java to get program portability.

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  4. Re:this article's ignorance is astounding by mabinogi · · Score: 4, Informative

    hmmm...java - self installing executable.
    Firefox, and netscape before it - self installing executable.
    Flash - self installing executable.
    MyEclipseIDE (a commercial J2EE feature / plugin for Eclipse) - self installing executable.
    Even Oracle is a simple clicky wizard away on Linux these days.

    The challenges to installing 3rd party software on Linux or any Unix are no different to the ones in Windows. - In fact, with the complete lack of package management in Windows, most Unix like systems are actually easier to create installs for.
    It's not the fault of the operating system if the application vendor can't be bothered spending the extra time to make the installation process easy.

    --
    Advanced users are users too!
  5. What the hell!? by SalsaDoom · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is of course, going to get modded down into oblivion, but damnit, this is going too far now.

    Are are you mods on crack? This is the lamest troll I've ever seen and you tools are lapping it up? Fuck me, but is slashdot ever full of POSERS if you guys can't tell that this is pure crap.

    FreeBSD has Linux have always been very neck to neck. While linux would be a touch faster at this, FreeBSD would be a touch faster at this, etc. Linux has better hardware support, FreeBSD tends to have better stability. It goes on like that and pretty much always had.

    FreeBSD has not benefitted from Apple. Apple has benefitted from BSD. Purely a one way relationship. Since when did Apple write FreeBSD's VM and SMP code, that makes "OSX running effiecently" -- OSX is not efficent. Its bloated to the max. You might dig is GUI and design, thats fine, but you can't tell anyone that its effiecient code because you don't have to look hard for benchmarks to make that claim a joke.

    FreeBSD does not run on Apples mach microkernel, holy shit, how did this slip by? Is this just Apple fanbois modding anything even remotely pro-apple up? This has got to be happening here. What the hell is this long and precarious history of FreeBSD -- its bloody free software, what exactly is supposed to happen to it? And... ooh! So annoying, the troll even posts about how FreeBSD has wicked HARDWARE support now -- argh! Like they even run on the same machines sand you guys still modded it up!

    If god were real he would strike you down for modding this up, even if you are a mindless apple fanboi.

    --SD

    --
    "Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
  6. A couple of corrections... by pschmied · · Score: 4, Informative
    I run FreeBSD 5.2 on a four-way Xeon box at work and thank Apple every day. If it weren't for the Mach micokernel from Apple we wouldn't be able to do these nice things with FreeBSD now or probably ever.


    Actually, FreeBSD does not use the Mach microkernel. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all use their own traditional kernels. The only free BSD flavor to sport a microkernel is Darwin (and its variant OpenDarwin). Actually, according to Apple, Darwin does not even support SMP on x86 platforms currently (though I'm sure this will change with Apple's transition to Intel)

    Apple's pattern is to sync every major Mac OS X release with the latest major FreeBSD release.


    Actually, this is only partly true. They tend to mix and match bits of the BSD userland from FreeBSD and NetBSD.

    Apple's biggest contribution has been in the form of good press. Actually, Apple's OS only sort of resembles FreeBSD. The init plumming is all different. Directory structures are very different. NetInfo is very different indeed than FreeBSD's more traditional model for user management, etc.

    And what's with the link in your last line to trollaxor.com? (Look at the period at the end of the last sentence.) As glowing an endorsement this would seem of FreeBSD and Apple (of which I'm fond of both), it would seem maybe that a lot of mods were cleverly trolled?

    -Peter