To all linux and windows users, please help me choose the better option.

[da808wiz]

command line freak! I'm raising my fist in the air, like I'm holding onto something that's invisible there. But based on this guy's questions, I don't think he's ready for BSD. That's like throwing him in the deep end of the pool to teach him to swim, and throwing a few pirannas in there along with him to motivate.

[da808wiz]

I don't know what kind of user you are, but I am a command line freak, of sorts. Although ubuntu does not drive users to the shell aka command prompt, I like the fact that so many tools are made in their raw form (gui-less) and available via apt-get install on ubuntu. You an almost assume they are there, and do an apt-get install [keyword] to find the tool you are looking for, whether it be video file conversion, audio file conversion, or even wifi "tools" Also, I know some of the tools are available on Windows, but they usually aren't the latest releases, and they run slower on Windows. The difference is so much so, that I have resorted to taking my new laptop, wiping the OS, installing ubuntu, then running Windows 7 inside a VM. I recently had to reload my last ubuntu laptop as a Windows PC as a gift. I have since been struggling to do things in Windows and find it very dissatisfying, to a point where I am tempted to buy a new laptop and load ubuntu on it. If you like to fiddle and take control of things to a point where the gui does not satisfy, ubuntu or any linux OS gives you that power. If you want to play minesweeper or solitaire without having to run Windows in a VM, then stick to Windows OS. I do consulting and I have never found a client whom I felt compelled to suggest they run ubuntu, or any linux OS, for that matter. I am busy enough as it is, and I know those free phone calls will kill me as they struggle with linux. I just tell them to be careful tell them, "Do not click on anything that says it can fix the problem, assume it's a hoax, unless you want me to come in and fix it - for a price, of course. Save your money by closing the window and don't even acknowle the question on your screen." I did have a ubuntu PC which got a virus on it, but I was extremely careless to a point where I ran just about anything just to try it and see, something I would never do on a Windows box. Eventually the system became pretty much unresponsive and was running tasks I had not installed. At that point I loaded the latest ubuntu again and it hummed along fine. I am a LITTLE more careful now on ubuntu, and have not had any problems. Well, until I gave away the ubuntu PC as a Windows one, of course.

[Lost User]

No technical fanboi arguments just simple logic on the main reason I continue to be a Windows developer: If I throw 100 rocks in all directions, 95 or more of them will hit Windows machines, 5 or less will hit Linux or other type machines. I'd say that covers it. -Max :D

[Sterling Camden independent consultant]

I think the piranhas belong in the Windows story. FreeBSD is more like finding yourself in the middle of the ocean on a beautiful yacht that is fully stocked, but the engine is completely disassembled. There is, however, a very good manual.

Contains coding, but not narcotic.

[Sterling Camden independent consultant]

"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." --Bertrand Russell

Contains coding, but not narcotic.

[bcw1000]

"other than being free" This is ambiguous - you might be clued up on this, but many aren't, so I want to comment. If you say that you are free, it doesn't mean we can have you for no money - it means we can't lock you up at all. You are Free. It's a recent historical development to equate freedom with price (and I think it's also a nasty comment on what our current societies value). Free Software is software that can't be taken away from people. That's the entire idea - freedom. Some people are willing to donate their work for others to use and license it so that no one can take it away. Some go as far as licensing their code so that anyone that wants to base their work on it must contribute their improvements back to the community as well - otherwise, write your own from scratch, and then you can do as you like with it. I live in a society that wants me to earn and have money and I don't have a problem with that. I code for my living and I'm valued for it. I don't mind working with a group of others (a "Company" of others) to provide something of value we can be paid for. No problem. At the same time, I value building up a body of software anyone can work with as long as they are community-minded. I think this is a good thing and benefits all of us to some extent. I license several projects I have written under free licenses. So keep in mind Freedom != $0 Those are very different. Cheers bcw1000

[Gary Huck]

Ah, I see - that's why he modified his post :)

[Gary Huck]

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're all the same only different. It comes down to this: "What will you get paid for?". The arguments are old and tired. Oh, *nix is free? Yeah, until you need something like a database or sorting utility. Windoz, well, we're not running 3.1 any more - even the *nix guys use Win for their workstations. Don't feel stupid - *nix guys are hard-core diehards. They are very proud to still use vi. Best operating system ever is/was VAX/VMS ...

[Lost User]

Sterling Camden / independent consultant wrote:

"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
--Bertrand Russell

Very profound, but I don't think Russell was talking about marketing a product. I guess you're implying that the market is "foolish" for having chosen Windows as it's platform. Either that or you're calling me foolish for capitalizing on it. You are certainly entitled to your opinion. I'm impressed (NOT). -Max

[athenatennis com sg]

I just find it easier to do new things on Windows, and even worse, I'm actually beginning to admire Microsoft now that they are no longer the single most dominant IT company around. Their .net and Visual Studio platform is very productive and I think its overtaken Java now, though in the end, they both allow you to do pretty much the same things if you know how.

[Florin Jurcovici 0]

What I write is from the point of view of a home user. From the point of view of a company, unless you are constrained by legacy applications running only on Windows, and which can't run properly with wine, I think there's no point in using Windows. Both initial and operating costs are much lower with Linux than with Windows on the desktop, as any serious case study demonstrates - please be aware, however, that there are lots of flawed case studies on the 'Net, mostly sponsored by MS or by organizations sponsored by MS. (For instance, a skilled Linux administrator may cost double of what a skilled Windows administrator costs, but can easily administer a network which is maybe ten times as large, without the need to invest into expensive administrative tools.) If you'd know Windows better, you'd know that Windows security is plagued by one essential design flaw, present there since the first versions of Windows, which couldn't be removed due to backwards compatibility. I don't know W7 well enough to know how much of its evil effects are still in place, but the problem is this: since the whole Windows API was designed at a time when there wasn't even a shadow of an access rights system in Windows, there are still many operations which any application needs to perform but which require administrative privileges. This is the backdoor through which all serious security attacks on Windows boxes happen - buffer and stack over-/underflows can cause arbitrary code to be executed in contexts beyond the user's security context. Since Linux had a pretty simple and straightforward access control mechanism in place since its inception, there's no such problem with Linux. I know MS would have you believe that it's just the sheer number of Windows boxes out there that attracts virus writers to Windows, but this is stupid, if you think a little about it. Why would somebody spend significant time developing a virus which needs to get to at least a few tens of thousands of Windows boxes to be heard of, instead of spending the same amount of time on developing a virus which could just target a few hundreds or thousands of essential servers (like for instance an entire Google data center), if Linux and Windows would be equally insecure? (However, most attacks on Windows boxes aren't all that smart, and rely more on user stupidity than on OS faults. So W7 is probably an improvement on previous Windows versions from a security standpoint - can't really judge this.) As for installation and configuration easiness, I'd say this

[Florin Jurcovici 0]

This is stupid. Google has a policy of no windows at all in their entire infrastructure - including workstations - because it is considered a security risk. Several companies, many of them from the IT sector, have adopted Linux on the desktop. Where did you get your opinion from? A MS marketing droid? As for servers, more than half of all Internet hosts are running Linux, and most others run Unix variants. Most computers in the top500 supercomputer list run Linux, as opposed to I think about 1% or less running Windows. Wouldn't you say this means something?

[Florin Jurcovici 0]

The numbers argument is just a lame excuse created by MS marketing droids. Don't fall for it. Use your brain. If you create a virus for Windows, you need to have it infect several tens of thousands of workstations just to get it listed in the news. You may get access to a few mail accounts, and you are unlikely to access any really important information (such as credit card numbers). If you manage to craft an attack against one single important server or datacenter, for instance a google or ebay or amazon datacenter, or even just hacking your local ISP (which probably runs Linux in his datacenter), you could achieve a much higher impact with a lot less effort. If Windows and Linux would be similarly (in)secure, do you really think anybody would bother hacking Windows, as long as more than half the Internet is run on Linux?

[Florin Jurcovici 0]

> On the other hand it can take days to figure out all the dependencies require to install something if the distribution does not provide it ... Right. But then again, with close to 40000 packages in the supported repositories, and with several software providers providing their own repositories, the likelihood of not finding something you need in the repositories is minimal, IMO. At least it never happened to me over the last four versions of Ubuntu.

[Andi Fairhurst]

I use both Ubuntu & Windows. My main OS is Ubuntu and I use VirtualBox to start a VM running Windows if I need to use VisualStudio - Best of both worlds. As to Microsoft Office, I use a product called Crossover from CodeWeavers. This allows me to use Office natively within Ubuntu.

[Florin Jurcovici 0]

I'm using the Eclipse pack created by the guys at Spring - seems to me STS is to Eclipse like Ubuntu is to Debian. Many of my co-workers use VS 2010. Do you know what they curse most about? It simply crashes all the time. Personally, I think VS in its 2010 incarnation, if it weren't for the stability problems, could be brought up to the level of Eclipse by spending probably a few thousand dollars per workstation for various addons (resharper being just one of them).

[Florin Jurcovici 0]

Programming experience: I do mostly Java, so don't get into VS too often. But the issue of Eclipse vs VS came up a few weeks ago during lunch break. A senior developer who knows nothing about Eclipse said: "I can't imagine anything being worse than VS 2010." Her issue: it crashes way too often. Also about programming, I don't understand why anybody would write an app without a web interface nowadays. You can use an embedded http server with an embedded database and configure it at startup to only serve locally, and start your interface in the browser. This way, it's much easier to create portable apps, and to support apps both locally and server-based. In an app created this way, you don't have limitations regarding local access to hardware or the filesystem. If you use something like qooxdoo, smartclient or sproutcore (don't use ext! You'll be in for some hard-core memory leak debugging if you do) you can create user interfaces which are as rich and fast as any native app you can build (actually, faster). Support: I only had to deal with MS support once. Since then, I'd use Google and various Linux forums as an alternative even if someone would pay me to use MS support. I'd also add a few more criteria to the comparison: maintenance, regular apps and games. Maintenance: Linux. You have just one update app, instead of having one from MS, one from Apple, one from Adobe and whatnot, and several apps having no update feature at all. The update mechanism even manages updates from one version to another, like updating from XP to Vista to W7. Regular apps - office, browsers, audio and video players: Toss up. You don't have IE on Linux - which may be an issue for corporate users tied to web apps which require IE. But you have all alternate browsers and then some available. OTOH, media players will require less of a powerful system to run a full HD movie in full screen using a very powerful codec. Games: Windows, but not by much. Most large, hugely marketed titles only appear for Windows, although there are titles which are released for both platforms. OTOH, there are small, tetris-like games for Linux that you don't get under Windows (though most care available cross platform), and which are less dumbing than minesweeper or solitaire.

[Florin Jurcovici 0]

Security: that's plain stupid. The really attractive targets are mostly Linux servers, not Windows machines. The reason why people attack Windows is that Windows is the low hanging fruit. It's not because there are many more Windows machines out there. More than half the Internet, and most highly visible sites, such as Google or Amazon are running on Linux. You can hack Windows with little to no effort, whereas you need to be highly skilled and put in a lot of effort into hacking Linux, that's why Windows gets most of the attacks. Windows' security issues are not necessarily related to its security system concept, but to how it is being used. Historical reasons require Windows to allow many applications to run privileged operations. If a user is able to cause a stack or buffer overflow which in turn causes arbitrary code execution, the security of the system can be easily compromised. If you look at security advisories all over the net, most relevant vulnerabilities are of this type. This doesn't happen with Linux, since on Linux privileged operations aren't allowed for code executed by a regular user. As long as the concept is wonderful but isn't really used, end users don't really care. Do you remember the Linus vs. Tannenbaum debate about micro-kernel vs. monolithic kernel? Linux didn't necessarily win market share over Minix because it's better conceived, but because it works properly. Similarly, the security system in Linux works, whereas the security system in Windows, no matter how wonderfully designed, doesn't. You can do multi-threaded debugging with gdb, and most debuggers for Linux are wrappers for gdb. Of course you can't debug into the heart of the X server, since the X server is another process, one to which you probably don't have access (and shouldn't have). Or did I get this one wrong? I won't even go there as to explaining to you why access to information is easier for whatever you do on Linux. You probably expect everything pre-digested, in which case stick to Windows - it's the right choice for you. Try identifying and mailing a question to the developer for some Windows component, to understand what I mean, and see how fast you can get insight into a library, or how fast bugs get fixed.

[Ajay Vijayvargiya]

Yes, I know the core engine is gdb. And yes, it support MT debugging, but not as rich as VS/Windows. As I said before, ptrace is not efficient, which is used for debugging. I dont care about internals of OS, when I need to develop on top of OS. You are fan of OS/kernel level development, but do you expect entire world to do the same, and not use the interface provided by the system? Why do I care how recursive-mutex works?

[Gary Huck]

What is stupid is people writing "this is stupid". I would suggest a more professional approach ... perhaps avoid [attempts at] insults? As to where I got my opinion: 12 years in the VAX/VMS world, 6 with various flavors of *nix, over the course of all that and a few more years with Windows scattered in there. Many different programming languages, many different databases. In your stats, you neglected one that we often read: 90% of desktops are running Windows. Who cares about all that, eh? Like my first comment: it matters what you get paid for. We could go on and on. We could also argue about flavors of ice cream or which race of humans is superior. Be nice.