16 replies to this topic

[mahesh2k]

shadowx, on 13 October 2010 - 10:27 AM, said:

It's the other way around

OSX is based on linux, indeed it is so heavily based on linux is virtually IS linux (or *nix, should i say).

Same goes for windows, things like windows 7 and Vista Aero and other GUI effects are all based on KDE and Gnome effects like Compiz which were around LONG before Gates copied the idea.

The only thing that apple and MS invented before *nix is instability

OS X is based on MACH BSD. Just kernel from the OpenBSD is ported and rest of the development is within apple under ground bunkers. So no linux there.

Windows rolled out WinFS, AERO, Wallop and other graphical rich demos during XP launch but didn't put it to execution because graphics/CPU intensive releases of those projects. It was way before compiz.You can read paul theurots blog if you want to know more about it. It was not gates idea at all behind those projects. Only AERO made it to the windows 7 and rest of the projects are dumped. WinFS which was the best file system improvement project was somehow dropped. Many people claim that resurrecting that project could help a lot with defragmentation and other issues of FS.

Not true about instability point - Ubuntu on 512MB ram is unstable when all the graphics bells are on. It hangs for more than 15 min so in many cases. Same is the case with KDE 4 improvements. Graphical programs do give instability irrespective of platform. if we want stability then we have to go back to CLI age.

[shadowx]

But if we are talking about two machines with identical specs running similar graphical options and programs (for example moderate effects enabled in vista/7 and in ubuntu MM both running their default browser (not firefox, whatever else MM came with Vs IE) with a couple of file manager windows open (so Dolphin and Explorer) and then doing everyday office work (a little word processing in OO.o Vs MS Office and other general work) the Linux machine will be much more stable over time. My linux machine at work is on all week and doesnt slow down or become unstable, windows on the other hand slows right down by the end of the week.

The other linux guy i work with has left his machine on for months without a crash or slowing down.

I work in a school and the number of windows machines that have strange problems like over time a user will get "stuck" and not be able to log on requiring one of us admins to login and remove the user from the users list (otherwise the machine tries to authenticate between the network and the local machine and it cant, all users should be removed from the local list on logout) or general corruption errors leading to machines in endless reboot cycles or a situation where windows hangs for an infinite amount of time on a network login until one of us re-images the machine or manually removes the network client, removes the local user directories and users and reinstall the client.

All the servers run on Nix, my main machine in the office is Nix and it is my belief that if we were fully Nix and taught the users then we would be in a better position.

[mahesh2k]

Microsoft Word on Windows and OSX will not show you any difference in performance. Word under win4lin or crossover will have it's issue irrespective of RAM and other system resource for linux. Open office leaks more memory and has more crashes on windows and OSX than linux. Ask people out there how many tiems OO crashes on windows and OSX. The number is more on OSX than on windows. OO obviously performs better on linux plus releases and fixes are quick on linux. Firefox eats more memory irrespective of the operating system. I'm sure this is where chrome will take over it soon.

Games is another thing which game development companies decide based on the profitable platform. So fat windows and OSX are the profitable platform because people actually think about spending money on there. Performance wise graphically rich games are there on windows than osx and linux. OSX lost flash as gaming platform whereas linux platform thrived on getting it on their platform. OSX needs to come up with their own directx like sdk for gamers if they want to attract more customers.

I do agree that for server side linux performs well especially if we work on php. That aside limited students using lab for windows server 7 installation will have no issue imo. But that depends on what we do with it.

[shadowx]

Undoubtedly there is a lot of weight on the link between the higher applications like office and the deeper systems of the operating system but i still maintain that if you need 100% uptime, reliability, stability, speed and security you simply have to use linux. In mission critical environments you cant risk the instability of windows. The only reason we use windows on the workstaions here is for the benefit of the kids who arent taught ICT anymore they are taught "How to use microsoft windows XP" and "How to use microsoft office".

The irony is before i started here they used OO on all the machines, then we had problems because users were using MS word at home and couldnt open the ODT documents saved here at home. So we changed to office 2003, all was going fine until office 2007 comes out, we install that and instantly have issues because people who use OO or MS office 2003 at home now cant open .docx files and then an even weirder error where if a user logs on to an older machine (Where we updated office 2k3->2k7 rather than fresh install of XP and then office 2k7) and do some work in office 2007, then log off when they next log on to that machine it will give an "Access denied" to all documents opened in office. Even to uys as admin users with 0 restrictions we get denied access to documents. The only way to solve it is to restart the machine and clean the cache which office somehow stores clearing out the stored permissions.

Linux doesnt do that

[mahesh2k]

If you're talking about mission critical environment where people make money, profit and userbase then linux is NOT the way to go. It saves money on building things but kills many small aspects of business where people need to be rewarded for work. Reliable ? Most of OEM windows installations never had that issue. Still using windows XP and have no major issue. Uptime ? not using server on daily basis so can't comment. security ? never failed by windows. speed ? fine. Never had issue with access denial for office 2007. not sure if it's office error or license manager error. Most of OEM installations never had such issue for me with office/OS.

[shadowx]

A commercially support version of linux, such as those releasef by Novell are industry standard almost in network architecture. We have one windows server here and that is purely here to support the information management software we used which is windows based with a windows backend.

There is no reason on earth to choose a windows backend for a server environment. It has no advantages whatsoever.

Security: Microsoft has consistently shown they are incapable of proper security. Nuff said. There are no viruses for linux, the permissions system means that when correctly implemented the only possibly way for the system to be compromised is through insecure passwords.

Controllability: The mere fact that windows is so difficult to configure (deeply, not changing a background image) makes it useless. With linux you can change EVERYTHING, absolutely EVERYTHING so easily. Sure it isnt easy to get the changes to work correctly first time but with knowledge and experience a good technician can get linux to jump through hoops and courtesy. That means that a system can be hacked together (note i say "hacked" to mean put together in a way which is a bodge job or more forceful than just installing a program) to do literally anything in the network. You can hack up a proxy, dhcp, dns, auth servers, storage servers, backup servers, firewalls, everything using linux, there is no need to use windows at all.

Stability: How often does linux crash? I have never had a full system crash on me. Blue screens? Never. The one time i have had an unusable system was when i hacked apart my X11 config file (im not sure if you know nix but the X server is the graphical interface, broken config file = no display on screen) however linux detected that it was broken and offered me a basic GUI and easy options to edit the config file and remove my changes manually. Reboot, done. On windows... it would take hours, system resets, copying files, resetting drivers, its just a mess.

Speed: Linux is always faster than windows when they are configured to a similar standard (Ie effects, caching, indexing etc...) The fact that linux seems to never leak memory either from the OS or the applications means that over time it doesnt slow down. Windows does.

For a server linux is the only choice, it isnt even a choice its more like "oh, im buying a server, what version of linux would i like..."

For a front end to users windows has its advantages in the fact that users are dumb. I regularly get calls saying "X program isnt installed", it is, i know it is but i have to go to the room and make a shortcut on the desktop.... That isnt the fault of the OS but it does mean that we are limited to what we can do which is a shame. For a desktop windows can suffice, it isnt perfect but as you said XP is a decent OS and it is my favorite windows OS, win7 is nice but too locked down and too graphical. XP is gritty.

But for a server windows just hasnt got anything useful.

[mahesh2k]

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A commercially support version of linux, such as those releasef by Novell are industry standard almost in network architecture. We have one windows server here and that is purely here to support the information management software we used which is windows based with a windows backend.There is no reason on earth to choose a windows backend for a server environment. It has no advantages whatsoever.

There are TONS of reason of choosing windows server as application server. In fact it is selected by many companies just for that. I'll not argue on network environment because i think that linux/unix over server environment performs better.

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Security: Microsoft has consistently shown they are incapable of proper security. Nuff said. There are no viruses for linux, the permissions system means that when correctly implemented the only possibly way for the system to be compromised is through insecure passwords.

No viruses ? I disagree. I don't know if my URL's will be stripped from reply if not then see these 4 links.

1. http://www.securityf.../columnists/188

2. http://en.wikipedia....i/Linux_malware

3. http://www.linux.com...ntivirus-needed

4. http://www.linux.com...mune-to-viruses

Numbers are low but that doesn't mean there are no viruses. Almost any popular platform carries viruses as they open SDK for interface with the OS.

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Controllability: The mere fact that windows is so difficult to configure (deeply, not changing a background image) makes it useless

I don't know what you are trying to customize but i can assure you that OEM installations usually comes with pre-configuration and custom configuration software from single click interface. There are shell scripts just like in linux/unix to get things done. Besides Dell, HP are known for this type of windows configuration software development.

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Stability: How often does linux crash? I have never had a full system crash on me. Blue screens? Never. The one time i have had an unusable system was when i hacked apart my X11 config file (im not sure if you know nix but the X server is the graphical interface, broken config file = no display on screen) however linux detected that it was broken and offered me a basic GUI and easy options to edit the config file and remove my changes manually. Reboot, done. On windows... it would take hours, system resets, copying files, resetting drivers, its just a mess.

Speed: Linux is always faster than windows when they are configured to a similar standard (Ie effects, caching, indexing etc...) The fact that linux seems to never leak memory either from the OS or the applications means that over time it doesnt slow down. Windows does.

Linux with any resource hungry window manager (gnome/kde)or effect manger like compiz easily gets crashed. You can do a lot with X11 but you are comparing linux with full blown graphics and whistles in modern operating system so X11 is not good excuse against AERO installed system or Aqua installed OSX.

Speed ? yes. linux is faster in booting but when it comes to window management and application processing it makes no difference in comparison to other OS.

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For a server linux is the only choice, it isnt even a choice its more like "oh, im buying a server, what version of linux would i like..."
For a front end to users windows has its advantages in the fact that users are dumb. I regularly get calls saying "X program isnt installed", it is, i know it is but i have to go to the room and make a shortcut on the desktop.... That isnt the fault of the OS but it does mean that we are limited to what we can do which is a shame. For a desktop windows can suffice, it isnt perfect but as you said XP is a decent OS and it is my favorite windows OS, win7 is nice but too locked down and too graphical. XP is gritty.
But for a server windows just hasnt got anything useful.

If you're in hosting business like opaque then you know how this distro choice issue makes difference. there are some buggy and less maintained or overly tamed distros like gentoo, ubuntu and red hat. this is the reason people prefer CentOS/Suse etc for VPS and dedicated server setup. Simplymepis changed it's kernel 5 times from gentoo, ubuntu, debian stable and 2 more, so you can see that it is constantly under change and people if want to get things done don't want to go through changes of apps/kernel or license all the time. This release of X distro dropped this Y software and in next release something else in repository. There are license issues with codecs, commercial apps in repository etc. You need to understand that people use software to get things done and not to join some carnival to constantly put them into learning phase with each distro release. You may call windows users dumb but computer softwares are for making things easy and faster - it's all about getting things done at the end of day. Nobody wants to spend time hacking linux just to get little work done in 1 hour or so. You know the issue of Open source licensing can cause -especially after reading about google vs oracle and oracle vs document foundation fork. No wonder in few months OO will be replaced by libreoffice if oracle didn't revoked it's restriction on OO community. Put one commercial feet in open source world and some license rips you off. Unlike commercial softwares Open source community based softwares are unstable with things like license, freedom and persistence,support, ease of use.