Advantages of Linux over Windows

Post Reply New Topic

Well, it was many companies that did that. For instance Apple was pushing to put its Macintosh computers in schools before Windows even existed. I don't know how Microsoft could have made computers more available. For one thing, they don't make personal computers, and they never have. Almost all of the aspects of computers that make them more accessible to less skilled people can be credited to other companies: Digital Research made CP/M, which was probably the first successful personal computer OS. Xerox can be credited with creating the GUI, and Apple for incorporating it into their PCs and turning it into a commercial success. I think MS gets too much credit for being the first one to popularize computing.

What they don't get enough credit for, however, is all of the other achievements they have made. Most of their innovations have been in the area of standards. Here are some of them:

- The FAT filesystem, which due its simplicity is now the de fact standard for solid state drives such as USB flash.

- The ISO 9660 filesystem that is used in CDs and DVDs, developed as a joint project with ECMA.

- Several typefaces, including Arial, Andele Mono, Courier New, Comic Sans MS, Times New Roman, Impact, Verdana, Georgia, and Webdings.

- The HTTPRequest object in Javascript, which was the seed that evolved into Ajax.

- The Rich Text Format (RTF) markup language used for creating formatted text documents.

As for the products that Microsoft actually makes money off of, I don't see them as being innovative at all. For one thing, a lot of it is copied. If you want to know what I mean, just take a look at KDE and Aero (ironic, since KDE comes from Linux, which MS is claiming infringes on their patents). If MS would just share their software ideas, maybe they would have a more positive impact on technology. The NTFS filesystem, for instance, has very little chance of achieving anything in the long run, simply because it's proprietary and they are the only ones who are allowed to use it.

I don't hate Microsoft as much as I used to. Since I've become more aware of the things I've listed, I've realized I benefit from their innovations every day. Still, I think they are doing more harm than good, though I have no qualms about using Microsoft products as long as I don't have to pay them for it and sponsor their efforts to destroy open source. I don't hate them so much as I consider them a threat, and I don't think anyone should be allowed to be as powerful as they are.

Last edited by LordoftheMonkeys on 10 Sep 2010, 3:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Grow up.

Apple makes great software. I would have to say OS X is the best OS I have ever used. It has more software written for it than Linux, while it still has the power and flexibility of Unix that Windows lacks.



Linux is NOT made by people in their garages. Most of the kernel is developed by corporations nowdays. Several distros, such as OpenSUSE, Red Hat, and Oracle Enterprise, are made by companies as well. If you want a Linux that's proprietary like Windows, you can use one of those.



Ironic that they say this, considering that Apple spends $hitloads of money on making OS X. Also, people do make money by making Linux. Red Hat, for instance, offers Red Hat Enterprise Linux for free but charges for service.



It is the general consensus that Windows 7 is far from junky. It is also the general consensus that earlier Windows are crap, and Microsoft was making those for far longer than Windows 7. They got where they are now mostly through marketing. Also, isn't it kind of fanboy-ish to take sides like that?

My point was that none of those fanboy opinions are correct, so thank you for correcting them. They were intentionally incorrect.

As far as earlier Windows versions being crap: anything currently supported in the Windows NT line is fine so long as it's handled by a competent administrator.

As far as Mac OS X: from v10.5 onward I've had nothing but problems with it. Now, this may be because I'm running it in managed enviroments mostly, but 10.3 and 10.4 were far more stable and broke less often than 10.5 and 10.6 do (although 10.6 is better than 10.5). 10.5 randomly disconnects from a directory server, after all.

I have used CP/M a little in the past, and a friend who helped write it once told me a neat story about it:

Somebody at Digital Research was once scheduled to have lunch with somebody at IBM, and MS-DOS ended up going into machines not long after that guy missed his appointment!

I don't know what you mean by "break", but I have had very little problem with Mac OS X 10.5. The only problem I've had is that it slows down when I have over about a hundred tabs open in Firefox, but this is due more to the fact that 1. Firefox sucks (I just recently switched to Chrome), and 2. I only have 2 GB of RAM so the computer ends up using more virtual memory than I would like. Mac hardware is pretty $hitty. The OS itself, however, is very stable. I just wish Apple would write OS X it so it could run on PCs. That would make life so much easier.

Splitting hairs, I never said that. But they cracked the market and turned a luxury into a need. I used the early Macs too and loved them(almost as much as the Apple IIe), but despite being out of the gate first, Apple stopped accelerating for some reason. I recall a growth in dos based machines that was only amplified by the introduction of windows.

The rest? I agree with you especially:

It's all virtual memory, what I think you mean by that is that you're swapping to disk more than you would like.

The reason Mac OS X is so stable, relatively speaking, is because Apple tightly controls the hardware. However, if anything tiny goes wrong with it, it's not terribly fault tolerant and throws a hissy fit. Anyway, the issues I've had with it are random kernel panics and constant network disconnects, from 10.5 onward. I know it's because there's a very large code rewrite in between, but 10.4 was much more simplistic and worked just fine.

They took those out of the public domain recently. Or rather, the right to freely distribute them. Someone involved with Red Hat made open source equivalents and the issue went away again.

I can testify to OS X being less stable than its reputation. I've had several unprovoked kernel panics.

Did you look up how inode pointers work?

I'll say it upfront, the UFS style inode is vastly inferior to NTFS. However, ext4 with extents enabled do not use the tradition inode format. IMOHO, ext4 is at the same level as NTFS in terms of design (but not the surrounding features provided by the OS).

The problem of inode is that only the first 12 block entries are directly addressed. It means that only this part of a file can be accessed without further table lookup and thus disk seeking and read to find out where the file is on disk. The 13th entry used indirect address, that is it points to a block on the disk that contains the real addresses of the file. The 14th used double-indirect address and the last one triple-indirect address. In a word, the file access time is increased exponentially to file size.

ext4 when using extents, can have 3 directly addressed extent entries. Because each extent can map up to 128MB of data which would have taken 32k entries before, it's a huge improvement.

NTFS treats everything including the real data runs as attribute, so the number of resident extents depends on the amount of space used for other metadata like ACL. For very small files, it can even be stored in the MFT itself. But I don't really think such cases are common enough to have any impact on general performance. In general though, NTFS can store more resident extents which should translate to better performance with small files.

When ext4 with extents need more than 3 entries for a file, it can not use any directly address entry. The inode instead points to the address of a single index node. This is a table of addresses of leaf nodes, which in turn stores the address of the data blocks of the real file. It's effectively a fixed depth B-Tree. Again look up the performance of this data structure to get a hand of the pros and cons. In summary, these data structures can not be stored in the inode, so there will be less locality of space and the 2 level table look up has more overhead. But manipulations and even random access can be faster.

It's similar with NTFS in that when extents cannot be stored residentially, the list points the data blocks that stores the extents instead. But NTFS can use single level table for most files unless your disk is heavily fragmented. It's also the reason behind the common consensus that one should leave at least 25% free space on a NTFS volume.

Interesting, thanks for the info.

Its actually more secure by design than windows.

More advantages over windows:

-Harder to break.

-Easier to fix if you were dumb enough to break it in the first place.

-Endless possibilities.

How so?

Because Windows started from single-user MSDOS, with a bit of half-hearted security bolted on later. Then the NT variants came along, with their attempt to "outdo" Unix security, resulting in things like file security "creep". Linux started from the mature *nix stable, with solid security as standard from the beginning.

Windows NT has been multi-user from the ground up. Windows 9x and DOS are ancient history, and were designed to meet home computing needs years ago. So again, how is Linux more secure by design than windows NT?