Both operating systems have their advantages and disadvantages. Windows is very easy to use, and is already widely known. It also tends to come preinstalled (not that Linux installations are difficult), and many more games are available on Windows than on Linux. However the biggest advantage of Windows is that there is still a lot of software out there, especially specialised software, which only runs on Windows. If you or your company depends on any such software you may well have no choice but to stick to Linux.
On the other hand Linux is free (in price) - and even when you decide to buy a shrink-wrapped distro from the vendor, it works out MUCH cheaper than an equivalent Windows installation. Being open-source, it also advances more rapidly and is more reliable. Being Unix-based, it had networking (and therefore security) designed into it from day 1, and has LOADS of software included with it, like web servers and so on. I am currently working on Windows at work (not my choice), and I often run into these differences. I wanted to add some virtual hosts to IIS on my XP box and discovered that XP restricts you to one virtual host. The software itself is quite capable of hosting more, but a business decision was taken at Microsoft to limit XP so that people would buy the (more expensive) server version for serious stuff. That's a bit like cheating to me. On my freely-downloaded Mandriva CDs the software they include is not restricted at all - the apache web server will let me use every bit of its functionality, even though Mandriva does sell a "server version" of its software. Also I am developing with .NET and I've lost count how often I've needed to see exactly what is happening under the hood, in order to get my apps to work, but .NET is distributed as binary only. There is a "shared source" thingy but the red tape and NDA's and stuff that you have to go through is not for the faint of heart. So essentially, Linux is not for everyone. The myth that I want to work against is that Windows is. I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all solution, which is why there are so many Linux distributions. On Saturday 05 November 2005 14:56, Jean Azzopardi wrote: > Can anyone tell me any advantages of Linux over Windows, despite its free > price and its opensourceness? Because I have some trouble convincing some > of my friends... > _______________________________________________ > MLUG-list mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailserv.megabyte.net/mailman/listinfo/mlug-list
