Can someone explain .......Linux vs Windows

[linuxyogi]

Hi,

As we all know Microsoft is an incredible rich. God knows how many people work there and I guess they all get paid very well.

Still they release after release they create an OS which is unstable and insecure.

Majority of Linux as we all know is free leaving RHEL, SUSE, etc and still Linux has become a stable and secure platform.

What do you think is the problem with MS ? They lack ability ? They are lazy ?

One thing I must admit coz its reality is the fact that Win is much more user friendly than any Linux distro. So that credit goes to MS.

[3rdalbum]

Windows is not more user friendly. Just more people are familiar with it.

[coldraven]

You mean the Widows that was always asking "have you got the driver disc" for everything.

[PJs Ronin]

Never underestimate Microsoft. You don't get to be that big, and change the way the world works, by having bad products and no matter what anyone says there aren't too many bad Microsoft products. Some products were less thought out than others (Windows ME, Vista etc) but others became so commonplace (XP) that hackers and users were drawn like moths to a flame.

If MS has had any faults since about 2006 (Vista release) it is one of bureaucracy. The company became too big to move quickly as the tech world changed overnight with the arrival of mobile computing. After the Vista fiasco MS needed a serious clean-out in management, but it didn't happen and MS paid the price with lost market share and stagnant stock prices.

Perhaps with a new CEO, Microsoft is ready to re-invent itself. It wouldn't surprise me.

Oh, and for every enthusiast who is prepared to sit at a CLI and type "sudo apt-get update" there are a gozillion people who much prefer to click on a little MS popup that says "Your computer has been updated, please restart now <click> restart now <click> restar...".

[buzzingrobot]

The developers and designers at Microsoft are as capable as any others.

Markets that bring complex technical systems to the mainstream public typically evolve to be dominated by one, or a very few, very large players. We saw that last century when hundreds of automobile companies coalesced into the handful that exist today. We saw it the the aircraft industry, and we continue to see it at work in the airline industry. We also see it in the mobile phone universe.

That kind of market domination creates a de facto standardization that consumers like, and it also makes it easy for third-party vendors to enter and succeed in a market.

At the beginning of the personal computing era, 30 years ago or so, multiple vendors sold multiple architectures running multiple and incompatible operating systems. This continued even after the introduction of the IBM PC running DOS, with multiple vendors selling slightly different hardware setups with slightly different versions of DOS, all with the intent of locking in customers to that one vendor. Rather quickly, the other architectures fell by the wayside and a specific variation of the 8086-based architecture dominated and became the univeral PC standard we know today.

This market was primed for domination by a single aggressive player. That turned out to be Microsoft. If it had not been Microsoft, it would have been IBM or someone else. While we all usually complain about market domination, the typical consumer, or corporation, welcomes the PC architecture standard that underpins Microsoft's domination.

Microsoft decisions about what is or is not included in Windows are made for business reasons, as they have to be. They cannot afford to toss out everything in Windows and revamp it because that would break compatibility with software currently use by hundreds of millions of customers, and immediately render much third-party software useless. (Linux does not need to worry about maximizing profits for stockolders since there is no such market, and won't be as long as the core FOSS licenses exist. As a result, Linux developers are much more at liberty to just stop supporting something. E.g., KDE 3 and Gnome 2.)

Whatever we might think about Microsoft's business practices, or the technical merits of it products, it is this huge amount of baggage Windows is dragging around that is the real impediment to its wholesale improvement. The same thing would have happened to any other vendor.

Windows is the Volvo of the software world (Substitute your own conception of boring, good-enough car.). Microsoft's customers like it that way. As MS learned with Windows 8, its customers want Windows to stay pretty much as it is. They want Volvos, not Teslas.

[philinux]

moved to ubuntu, linux and os chat.

[k-tim-b]

It's a very simple matter of preference and what your comfortable with. Most of the world has been exposed to windows and it is what they expect when they turn on a computer usually. Linux has had much less exposure but is trucking along. Both have their pluses and minuses. It just boils down to what you like. I choose linux because I like to tinker, I want to work on servers, and I don't want to be trapped into buying software.

[orb9220]

"Still they release after release they create an OS which is unstable and insecure. "

Hmmm that has been a reaching statement that I found through experience to be a matter of perspective and many times false. I have run XP & Win7 for over 15 years secured without malware,spyware & viruses. And ran stable without drivers/hardware issues. But then again I was a field tech that drove around through the last half of the 90's servicing computers. And before that a engineering tech at Siltronics for 8 years. And a computer geek through the 70's-80's with my Vic20,Commodore 64,Amiga 500,1000,2000,3000 and onto the Ibm PC variants.

I have found that insecure or stability issues are more a result of user's lack of motivation to educate and apply necessary maintenance to their desktop. No educating themselves on safe web browsing practices. No understanding about viruses and malware. Not making backups of their precious data. No time to time cleaning their system out of unused programs. Upgrading to latest graphic drivers when there was no need for it in the first place or just installing "Things" with no rhyme or reason as the no. 1 breakages and rolling back to tried and true solved the issue. Or badly implemented 3rd party drivers and blaming windows for the instability.

Honestly I have found more breakage in the Linux world that had nothing to do with user's practices. Bugs galore and more specific and unique to specific hardware issues. Or updates that bork the desktop. That takes some heavy lifting to solve or workaround. Which isn't the average user's forte.

When your hardware is totally supported then sure Linux is inherently more secure,more stable and a better OS to use. But so is Windows.
You can argue the philosophical reasons as sufficient in and of itself not to use windows. You can argue the positive merits of a Open & Free OS community.

But to argue that Windows is inherently a bad OS or less stable than Linux is going a bit too far from the technical merits alone. As bad user's practices or bad 3rd party drivers are specific to them and not the windows OS. To blame windows for that is far reaching and disingenuous at best.

Don't get me wrong. As hate Windows for their practices and there evil doings part. And Win8 was a flop.
But have used Windows7 & XP with a magnitude of less issues then in Linux back in Red Hat 5 1996 or 2006-08 days. Loving it again as Linux as come far and now it is becoming a true OS that quite capable to be used by the masses. As long as there is someone there to hold their hand or they are willing to invest some time in learning to do linux.
.

[sammiev]

Windows? I thought they were used in houses and buildings.

[buzzingrobot]

...have used Windows7 & XP with a magnitude of less issues then in Linux back in Red Hat 5 1996 or 2006-08 days
.

I'd agree that Linux several years ago could be annoyingly weak in terms of hardware support the desktop. I do not find it so at this point. (Unless you insist on brand new devices.)

Windows primary security vulnerability now seems to be its ubiquity. Malware is generally done for profit, so the biggest ROI is in attacking Windows and Windows users.

However, earlier, when Windows moved into the internet environment while it was still transitioning away from its DOS base and building out NT and the NT kernel, things were pretty ugly for a long time. Seemed to me MS often proceeded as if the web was simply an extended office LAN.

Your comments about Users Behaving Badly are well taken, on any platform.