Linux vs. Windows: What's The Difference? 1219
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.'"
Please note... (Score:5, Informative)
Just a little summary for people too impatient to read the article..
crucial difference (Score:2, Informative)
The difference is pretty obvious from where I sit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apps remove the difference (Score:2, Informative)
Re:An important difference (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Ooh! Selective comparison... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Ooh! Selective comparison... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Comparing Kernels or Windows? (Score:3, Informative)
POSIX isn't a kernal. It's a standards specification. The first POSIX-compliant OS was VMS, which is about as un-unixy as you can get.
I went to a DECUS symposium in the early 1990s where two VMS engineers explained what they had to do to achieve POSIX-compliance. It was humorous in that the official validation suite couldn't necessarily run on a strictly POSIX-compliant OS, because it assumed the presence of common UNIX tools that weren't actually in the spec at the time.
Some observations.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
Re:An important difference (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the MS Visual C++ compiler is free now. Just not the IDE.
http://howtos.beaucox.com/win32-vc7-compiler.html [beaucox.com]
Re:An important difference (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Apps remove the difference (Score:3, Informative)
Re:For me... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A rushed list... (Score:3, Informative)
Open Irfanview [irfanview.com] (free), half a dozen mouse clicks and it's churning away doing the job.
This is assuming you're not running XP and have the MS Image Resizer PowerToy [microsoft.com] (also free) which makes the job even quicker. Browse to the folder with the photos (usually MyDocs > MyPics > Folder, or it'll be open after the automatic picture transfer has done it's stuff), Ctrl-A, right-click, Resize Pictures, click on Medium (800x600), OK.
Or just install ImageMagick for windows.
I'm no windows fanboy, but it's easy to automate this sort of stuff on most OSs I've used and Windows is no exception. But hey, if you feel superior typing away commands to do this sort of basic stuff, feel free.
Re:Linux in general (Score:1, Informative)
As a side note: BSD is a server OS (no question about it). Windows is a desktop OS (being twisted into a server platform). But which is Linux?
no.. you're just too anxious to pigeonhole everything, aren't you?
I use freebsd for my desktop, and I know it's very common here where I work. Sure, freebsd can be tuned
for server style usage, but it also has gnome-2.6 and firefox and all the other things you would expect for a desktop.
insisting that bsd is for servers, linux is for desktop, etc. is just not true, and it confuses people with misleading information,
Re:Well, speaking on the article... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Not entirely free if you're on dial-up (Score:3, Informative)
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 [microsoft.com], .NET Framework SDK and Redistributable [order-5.com], and the optimizing compiler included with VC++ Toolkit 2003 [microsoft.com].
Looping in Windows shell (Score:3, Informative)
#> for ((i=1;i<10;i++): do echo $i; done;
okay do that simple doodle loop on windows shell.
Try this:
Then try cmd /? and help for from the Windows 2000 or Windows XP command prompt.
Re:An important difference (Score:5, Informative)
Of course the solution set looks pretty small, after you've arbitrarily eliminated half of it. Nothing's stopping you from downloading Cygwin [cygwin.com].
Sure [microsoft.com] you [microsoft.com] can [microsoft.com].
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. :-)
Re:The Difference (Score:3, Informative)
1. Just the hardware itself could have defects, bad connections(memory, CPU, bus), RH interference, bad power supply, heat issues, etc
2. The software may not be entirely the same.. this could include drivers and patches
In short, no two machines are the same. Hardware has varying tolerences that are smaller than ever these days. You're bound to get flakey performance from one of many of the "same" type machines.
Pan
Re:Some observations.. (Score:3, Informative)
Please clarify your point. On NT/2k/XP all drivers run in Ring0. Why should printer drivers be different?
As far as security goes printers can be locked down just like any system object. This has nothing to do with the underlying driver though.
Uh... VMS Unix System?? (Score:2, Informative)
Umm... VMS is not a UNIX operating system. They're very different.
One thing they do have right, though... NT has a lot in common with VMS. I've heard through the grapevine that some of the original VMS code comments also existed in NT4 source.
Re:An important difference (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:It's a vicious cycle (Score:1, Informative)
Maybe for XP Home...
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/productinfo/
Perhaps the POSIX subsystem isn't installed at all by default, but SFU installs it separately. Since the kernel has its own API (ie, not Win32), it shouldn't be hard to add subsystems after initial system setup.
Re:Ooh! Selective comparison... (Score:3, Informative)
Wireless support for linix is still really patchy, fair enough wireless is still a fairly recent technology (compared with most PC hardware) but if buy a wifi card without checking it's compatibility then your chances of it working with linux are less than %50.
Re:windowing (Score:3, Informative)
The reason X works badly has nothing to do with the one extra context switch per action. In fact if X is just drawing and avoiding the problem calls, it has far fewer context switches than Windows, since the drawing calls are all stuffed in a buffer and sent as one block (it's possible Windows is doing this in modern versions, too, I don't know).
The problems are:
1. There are two unsynchronized processes talking to the window server: the "window manager" which draws the borders, and the application, which draws the internals. Imagine if just one program sent the command to make the window bigger and stuffed into the same buffer the instructions to draw the all-new window border and contents, right on the heels of the make-window-bigger call. This is what Windows effectively has, that X lacks. And it is not going to be fixed until we admit that it is ok for programs to draw their own window borders.
2. There is a serious lack of useful drawing primitives, meaning that X programs that want to look good have to send entire images of their windows to the server. Now GDI32 is not a lot better, but it does support rotated and scaled fonts, drawing images without having to figure out the "visual" and with *one* call, and the new ones support alpha-based compositing (well, kinda), and the font drawing was switched to antialiased in a way that let old programs use the antialiased fonts. And hundreds of other indications that the people trying to fix GDI32 are somewhat more active and smarter than the X consortium, which did nothing!
Re:It's a vicious cycle (Score:3, Informative)
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."
Re:Linux is better! (Score:3, Informative)
Or for 9x/ME
I like Linux like the next guy, but you don't really have to hack the registry to update Window's IP address. Of course, you usually have to reboot 9x. I never really understood why, but certain changes just never take otherwise. (Spoken as a network admin who has had to migrate network settings several times for about 200 machines.)
Re:Apps remove the difference (Score:2, Informative)
(emphasis mine)
In KDE, just open up the Control Panel, click KHotKeys, and set win+e to open up firebird (mozilla, konqueror). That's *maybe* 5 mouse clicks and two keypresses. Does anyone here know how to do that in Windows?
Re:"Just download it" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well, speaking on the article... (Score:3, Informative)
You can get it from here [microsoft.com]
Re:OK Mr. DOS-hell smartypants... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:An important difference (Score:2, Informative)
Re:An important difference (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Apps remove the difference (Score:3, Informative)
Re:An important difference (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft now supplies free (as in beer) compilers for C#, VB.NET C++, J++, etc. with the dot net framework, which is available here [microsoft.com]. Longhorn will come with the
Re:An important difference (Score:2, Informative)
Minor Correction: VC++ is free (Score:2, Informative)
Re:An important difference (Score:5, Informative)
Re:tard (Score:3, Informative)
You can't even fucking spell.
Re:Ooh! Bad comparisons... (Score:3, Informative)
Not a list of hardware providers supporting Linux, but of devices that are supported by linux can be found at LFriendly [lfriendly.com].
Re:An important difference (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:An important difference (Score:3, Informative)
Re:An important difference (Score:3, Informative)
Yes [sourceforge.net], you can [php.net]. This is a huge misconception about Windows. I SSH into my work computer regularly (I'm in IT support). It has an SSH server installed. Through this, from home, I can double-click an icon on my desktop, enter a password, and it'll restart our apache servers. It's not difficult to do at all.
Scripting in windows is another great feat. Windows has a scripting host built in, which offers incredible functionality. It can use COM objects, which essentially allow your scripts to interface with most software you install on your computer (from Office, IE, iTunes, whatever), all within a script. PHP also runs on Windows, and that lets you write scripts. I've been using linux for years, and Windows for longer, and I have no problem getting Windows to do exactly what I want. Linux is definitely no more adaptable.
Re:An important difference (Score:5, Informative)
XP has fsutil [microsoft.com] 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.
Re:I like what Mark Russinovich does... (Score:1, Informative)
I found it a pretty fair and unbiased comparison.
His slides were previewed by both Linus and Dave Cutler(the senior architect for NT and Win 200*) and neither had a problem with the content.
Essentially what he was saying is that it's not suprising that they are similar given that they both have their roots in the 1970's; Linux with Unix and NT with VMS (Dave Cutler was the chief architectof VMS).
Re:An important difference (Score:2, Informative)
Not really. cygwin is a compatability shim to allow gnu (and other *nix) software to run on windows; cygwin+windows is a system able to run similar software to solaris, hpux, tru64... ie the largely platform-independent gnu tools. Linux is another platform that can have such tools "ported" to it, but isn't somehow magically their owner (just the most popular platform amongst non-corporate users)
Re:An important difference (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Re:Link to Windows Services for UNIX (Score:1, Informative)