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Microsoft Challenges Linux's Legacy Claims
Michael writes "Microsoft Corp.'s Linux and open-source lab on the Redmond campus has been running some interesting tests of late, one of which was looking at how well the latest Windows client software runs on legacy hardware in comparison to its Linux competitors. The tests, which found that Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box, were done in part to give Microsoft the data it needed to effectively 'put to rest the myth that Linux can run on anything.'"
Already people are commenting about how Linux can run on different processors than Windows. Not what they were testing.
From TFA:
""Quite simply, I wanted to examine this factually, using real customer scenarios to test this hypothesis: can Linux run on older hardware than Windows? In many developing countries and public institutions, such as a local library, they typically don't have deep technical staff, so they need to use software without lots of modification and customization."
Exactly. Saying windows 95 works on a 486 and KDE doesn't is stupid. I can just as easily go on about how windowmaker, blackbox, rox, etc. run fine on a 486 while WinXP won't even install.
The salient points are in the statment above. The claim that "most" linuix distros had limitations preventing them from accessing a 32mb system with "aceptable performance" is entirely unsurprising. I note that neither RedHat (to pick one) nor Windows XP would like such a system very much, especially for modern "desktop application performance" (read OpenOffice and MS Office). In that case it is really the apps that are the limiting factors.
They never state what distros were tested (I assume Novell and RedHat when in doubt) nor how installation was done. Rather they pull a nice switching strategy. They test some unnamed distros and then state that windows CE is better than them on legacy hardware.
That is much like saying Windows CE is better than Windows XP on legacy hardware or that MuLinux is better than RedHat on older hardware. In both cases the former was designed for such a task while the latter was not. In both cases the former have limitations that prevent them from running "Modern Desktop Apps", that is in fact the point.
This is a simple "bait and switch" comparison, and if this is all the CTO uses when comparing all distros of linux to windows for some use; fire them.
And the last time I checked, each one of those (except Mitel - they've flip-flopped a couple of times) started with Windows, and is shifting to Linux...
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
I think, to be honest, that all that was really shown is that popular modern Linux desktop distributions are targetted at modern hardware, and as a result don't run as well on older hardware. They ran Red Hat and Mandrake and Novell etc. 'out of the box' with no customisation to make it fit with the hardware - unsurprisingly the default install of such distros a targetted at modern systems and have hefty system requirements.
Pick up a distribution that actually claims to target older hardware, or just generally fit in smaller places, like say Damn Small Linux, Feather Linux or Zenwalk and I suspect you'll find much better performance and much lower system requirements all 'out of the box'. The counter-claim seems to be that Windows CE, with the right customisations, will run on older hardware too. Does anyone know if their is a release of CE set up for desktop use on older hardwre?
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Do you realize how much the environment is choking on throw-away tech every year? I covered this very topic http://techn0manc3r.blogspot.com/2005/12/linux-and -environment.html with links. Yes, it's a huge deal. Count me in with the other who recycles old Windows boxes I find and gets year's further use out of them. More money to donate to FOSS, less waste to the environment.
By the way, when I worked for no less an enterprise than Citigroup incorporated, you couldn't walk two feet in the processing center without tripping over a 486. This was only two years ago.
Actually, his whole post was wrong. Windows x64 runs more like a nightmare. Half the stuff is broken, a lot of 32 bit apps don't run correctly, drivers are not exactly easy to come by, and it's got just as much issues with security as the other versions of Windows.
Maybe Vista will make Windows 64-bit more seamless but I somehow doubt it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
No argument on that here.OP just wanted Windows running on non-x86 hardware, which it did back in the NT 4 days. And now again on PPC (sorta) with the XBox 360.
Heck, some of the security problems are legacy because of the support of the other architectures. For god's sake, add another ring for drivers so they can't touch the kernel. It's supported on the x86.
I'm just going to say up front that this is not a comment with a conclusion.
I've been in this silly business for damn near 40 years (augh); my first computer had 8K of memory (yes, 8K, not megs) but we successfully ran a whole small business accounting system on it. 100 lines per minute chain printer. TI doesn't make a calculator that small.
I went to grad school in Computer Science in 1983; we ran a whole graduate department on a PDP 11/70. Less than a megabyte of RAM, maybe 250 MB of disk total. Less than one MIP. We got a VAX in 1985; suddenly we had a WHOLE MIP, and a shared terminal in each grad student office.
I'm writing this on a G5 MAC. God alone knows how many MIPS --- thousands, certainly. I use it alone.
Frankly, I'm not sure where all the cycles go.
Do you realize how much the environment is choking on throw-away tech every year?
I've been volunteering at Free Geek in Portland. We get donated computers from individuals and companies, save what can be reused and recycle what can't. I haven't done anything on the recycle end yet myself (except reject newly received machines that will end up in the recycle area), but it looks like a huge job. There's a lot of toxic crap to dispose of.
Regarding the article, Free Geek sets PIII/500MHz as a minimum for a computer it will attempt to rebuild. Anything slower gets recycled. Once a machine is rebuilt, we install Debian. Because of this, I was under the impression that trying to run Debian on anything less that a PIII would be difficult, at least, if not a fool's errand.
Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
I use XP x64 every day at work, and this is news to me.
I don't know what "the stuff" is, but very little is broken. Can't think of anything off the top of my head.
32-bit applications are no problem. There is some weirdness with things like TortoiseCVS that work with 32-bit Explorer but not 64-bit Explorer. (Can't load a 32-bit dll into a 64-bit process.) And there's that: there are two versions of a few things.
Drivers are a problem, I have no audio and am missing some other minor things.
Security is hardly better than regular XP (there's hardware DEP...), but it's not worse. And I've actually had no problems with Windows' security personally.
5. More secure? If linux is more secure than Windows then it's only marginal. The difference is the user base. If I were trying to exploit something I'd much rather do so on 90% of the user base than the other 10% (percentages made up). Not to mention ma and pa aren't exactly the most tech savvy of consumers and may not know the importance of a firewall and updating often. Something which most linux users do know.
Please don't wome again with the larger user base argument. It's totally wrong. An example: what is the most popular and present web server? It's apache, yes you can tell it. What is the most targeted webserver? IIS, yes, indeed. I do not speak about defacements here, which are mostly caused by low security passwords or bad scripts, but attacks against the server itself.
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
> Here's the difference; there are many distributions of linux targeted at older, slower machines, going all the way back to 286's.
Well, no, Linux requires at least a 32bit CPU to run. The 286 was only a 16bit CPU. I remember reading back when I was originally isntalling Slackware that. I'm pretty sure it'll run on a 386, too, but the minimum I've ever tested it on was a 486.
Do not read this sig!
Have you tried putting BeOS or QNX Neutrino Desktop on the machine?
I've seen both work wonderfully on a P-166 w/ 32MB Ram; MP3 playback, web browsing, video, whatever. Lots of popular OSS will run on either (especially BeOS) with little trouble, including Firefox (unofficial builds, I think, look at BeBits.com). If all you want to do is make an old machine productive, those are your best bets. I'm sure there are torrents out there for BeOS (can't buy it anymore, except maybe on Ebay), and I think you can still buy the QNX i386 desktop install disc for a few bucks--it's the embedded and specialty versions that cost a bunch.
Of course, I used to have Windows 95A on a P100 w/ 64MB ram, and that never seemed too bad to me at the time... hell, I even played some 3D (true 3d, not just Doom) games on it. Go figure.
In all the discussion, I don't see anyone mentioning the key point: what are you going to be doing with the machine in question? Isn't that what the low-level object of the excersize is? Fundamentally, I think the problem breaks into two major requirements:
a) running an OS on old equipment which will allow a thin client to run on a server
b) using aps which will create files (such as Word/OpenOffice)
I've used some 21 operating systems over the last 15 years and they all have their pros and cons. The issue today is bloat-ware. All mainstream operating systmems and distros are getting larger and larger and require vast amounts of RAM to run properly. The problem is not the software that's included, the problem is that hardware detection lacks one specific capability: to configure the distro/OS to suit the hardware available. The only exception is Gentoo, but it does not even do the job I'm talking about. It compiles to suit the processor, but that's it.
I'm talking about a distro/OS that automatically slims itself down if it detects a PII on install. To date, I have not seen anyone attempt this (and it's quite a challenge). Furthermore, it would have to let the user know what they were going to sacrifice to make the system run at a reasonable speed.
Here's an example: say I install into a PIII, 600 Mhz machine with 64 Meg of RAM. There is no way on God's green earth that OpenOffice will run. KDE will require at least 128 Meg for basic performance. This means that the install has to tell the user: You're going to be running WVM or some other 'light' window manager and you'll be using a far simpler text editor. Also, a bunch of services may be stripped out and limits put on the number of, say, fonts that load.
Having an OS that tailors itself to the hardware is something that I have felt is long overdue and will help crush Microsoft's bogus tests and arguments in the Windows/Linux debate.
Recently, I note that there are changes coming to the Linux kernel which will allow for processor detection. The question is: who's up to doing it? Mr. Shuttleworth, are you listening?
*** Don't be dull.***
The problem is indeed that there are very few decent Windows admins.
I know that in 15 years of IT, admittedly not often working in Windows shops but often visiting numerous companies to help them setup FOSS solutions and integrate them w/ their existing (often Windows) stuff, I don't think I've met more than a couple decent admins. The others didn't appear to really understand what they were doing. That is if they were doing anything beyond the usual rebooting to fix the occasional glitch.
OTOH, while there are apparently fewer Unix admins in the wild, the average level is *much* higher (although I've seen my share of really bad ones too of course).
I used to understand Windows (well, what called that in windows 3.0 days) but nowadays, it seems to be volutarily obfuscated to me. If I had to learn how the system works I wouldn't even know where to start.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
When you produce crud you have also to produce FUD as the easy way to try to defray the perception that your products are singularly bad. The sole job and raison-d'etre for their Linux lab is to produce factitious/fictitious data showing that Linux is more insecure, vulnerable and unstable, more costly and limited in terms of every metric known to man than Windows. You have to give them 5/10 for their efforts at FUD and 10/10 for their advertising of Linux as I'm sure here are many who hadn't heard of Linux or paid it any attention before Microsoft alerted them to it.
Dude, I have Slackware 10.2 running on a wide swath of equipment far lower in power than that. 1 of them is an older 486 with 2 gig of ram in a PC104 formfactor that needs to go back on the top of a 200 foot tower to continue it's job of weather data collection and as a controller for a Ham radio digipeater on packet radio. This works absolutely fine for it's job and gives us abilities now that allow me to do almost complete reinstalls from the ground over the air.
And finally I dont remember which version of windows ever ran on the DragonBall processor but I do have an older Palm III here that has linux on it.
The article is a huge joke. Anyone that knows anything about linux will spill their guts laughing wanting to know why this April fools joke was released early.
Linux runs on Massively more than Windows ever Can. Windows can NEVER match linux and BSD in versatility scalability or power....
and I cant remember what version of Windows can run on Supercomputer Mainfraimes... but I know that many linux distros can. (Oh and my linux can scale past 8 processors and 16 gig ram easily.... Windows cant. Just to look at the other side of the discussion.
XBox 360 is windows based and running on a PowerPC variant.
Let me know when you can go to the store and pick up a copy of that OS.
Well even Wal-mart was selling XBox 360s, so I guess you could check there first. Or maybe Best Buy, they also were stocking them.
Oh and lets not forget that Windows NT4.0 was available on RISC, Alpha, PPC.
Let me know when you can put Windows XP on a box running one of those chips.
Who was talking about XP, we were talking about NT. Besides the fact that these architectures are not even supported by the hardware makers anymore, do you really think MS should do a full XP port to them? Brilliant...
And we could go on with Windows Embedded technologies that are also running Windows NT or a variant on everything from Network switches to Cable Boxes.
Let me know when you can purchase any of those OS'es without the associated hardware.
Actually, Windows Embedded can be purchased, goto www.microsoft.com and license it. It is just that simple.
BTW Since you see this as a Windows 'shortcoming' why don't you tell me how to purchase the version of Linux or FreeBSD running on my CableBox without the hardware. Oh wait, you can't do that.
In fact, pick any commerical hardware product that is running any specialized or 'embedded' form of Linux or *nix and show me where I can buy the software without the hardware.
Wow, guess Windows isn't so different...
The whole point of this article is how well you can run Windows XP or 2k3 (i.e., the *currently available* versions of Windows, not the old stuff) on legacy hardware.
Yes currently available... So show me where I can buy RedHat or SuSE for RISC or ALPHA then, or show me where I can Buy the embedded version of SuSE to put into a router I'm developing?
Stick to the topic if it is important to you, your misdirection is a waste of people's time.