Windows Vista VS Linux
November 30th, 2007(A very biased comparison)
About 7 years ago I started to dual boot Windows 98 SE and some flavor of Linux. This was the start of my exodus from the Windows world. I started spending more and more time on the Linux side than on the Windows side, and I liked it. By 2002 I was working for a wireless security company that had 75% of the staff running Linux, no dual boot. I quickly followed suit at work and at home, switching my flavor to Gentoo. So for 5 straight years I never used windows for my personal desktop. But for the last 2 full months I have lived 100% in Windows Vista.
User Interface
The first thing anyone notices while changing operating systems is the differences in the user interface. Linux has a ton of options, especially if you’re using a distro like Gentoo and don’t mind hacking at source code yourself. Over 5 years I tried many different things, from Fluxbox to Gnome to KDE to Rat Poison and eventually back to KDE. KDE itself has a ton of options, so I spent a lot of time tweaking things throughout the years until I got KDE how I liked it (minimal is good). I like shortcuts. All my often used apps had a Windows Key + Letter shortcut to launch them quickly. I didn’t use menus much, just the keyboard. I had my mouse settings set perfectly for how I liked sloppy focus and window raising to act. I made KDE fit me, instead of trying to fit myself to KDE.
Windows Vista… has almost no real options. You get what they give you and that’s about it. I’m not sure why this Aero thing is so special, it adds no functionality. It doesn’t make the UI easier to use, it just makes it slightly prettier. There is no easy way to get sloppy focus to work. I can’t figure out how to set Windows Key + F to launch firefox instead of windows search. I’ve tried to modify the Vista UI to fit me and have been forced to “just deal” with a broken UI. One thing I do enjoy is the windows copy/paste system. It took me a long while to get used to the Linux “select text to copy” and “middle click to paste” system, but I very quickly converted back to the windows-like ctrl-c/ctrl-v system in Vista.
Drivers
I’ve been running Linux on various Dell laptops. Lattitudes mostly: D500’s, D550’s, D600’s, etc. I’ve had almost no issues with drivers in Linux. It occasionally required some hoops to jump through, like using ndiswrapper in order to use the latest windows wireless driver in Linux. But both Gentoo and Ubuntu provided very easy methods to get that working. Over all my driver experience in Linux was pleasant. Things worked, they performed reasonably, and it didn’t crash (EVER).
In Vista, drivers are a pain. Seriously. I installed an updated graphics driver and as it rebooted I came to a black screen with a mouse pointer. It did nothing else. I tried rolling back to a previous system restore, but it couldn’t find anything to roll back to. All the recovery tools failed. I was forced to reinstall Vista. Then, every time I took my laptop home to my wireless network it would literally take 30 minutes for me to power up my laptop and get a good connection to the wireless network. An update was released by Dell for my wireless network card and that reduced boot up time to about 5 minutes! But still, it’s not perfect. It won’t associate to my home wireless access point unless I use the physical switch on the side of the laptop to cycle the antenna off and on.
Backwards Compatibility
The developer part of me really loved running Linux and developing for Linux. I could run Apache 1.x, 2.x, various php versions, various MySQL versions, all on the same laptop for whatever environment I might be developing for. It all just works.
Windows… you lose. If you need to support an older IIS/MS Sql environment, the best option I found was install Windows XP in a virtual machine! That’s completely lame.
User Access Control
So Windows has decided to join the other desktop operating systems and not give 100% no questions asked administrative rights to the everyday user! This is a NICE first step. And only a first step, it does not compare to running Linux with a non-root user using sudo to do the things you need to do as admin. In my opinion your shouldn’t NEED to use your administrator rights that often. I don’t understand why Windows requires it for so much.
The way it works is your Administrator account is actually disabled by default. Then your user account is thrown in to the Administrators group and UAC is turned on. Now whenever you attempt to do something you provide the appropriate token for that action. If the action is something like… installing malicious spyware through an activex exploit through an ad being displayed on a website you thought you trusted… it tries to use your administrator token. With UAC on, that token can not be used without your permission! Your screen flashes and a box pops up and asks you for permission. I don’t know what Windows XP was like, but I remember having to purge spyware every other day back when I ran Windows 98 SE. This is not the case with Vista + UAC. While using Internet Explorer I have had random requests to use my token that I did not initiate. So it does work and it is a good thing. DO NOT TURN OFF UAC.
Shadow Copy/System Restore
Shadow copy just rocks. Windows Vista keeps versioned changes of all your files. I’m not sure how it manages disk space issues and all that, but I haven’t had any issues there. You can roll back file changes, entire directories, restore deleted files, all sorts of stuff. It’s really super cool and I wish Linux had this out of the box too.
System Restore also rocks. You can create system restore points yourself, but Vista will actually create some important ones for you. Like before applying the latest windows update. I had to use this just the other day. Someone’s vista was all messed up, trying to bring up the windows file explorer failed with a bizarre error message. Most other programs seemed corrupted too. A reboot didn’t fix the issue. Fortunately, control panel still opened and I went in to System Restore. She had just installed a windows update that morning, so I chose that restore point and 5 minutes later her laptop was working again.
Package Management
All Linux distros do amazing package management. You go to one spot, command line tool or gui depending on your distro, and can see what’s installed, see what’s available, install and uninstall apps. All from one spot. This is essential for running a server, and is why I will fight to the death to run something on a Linux server as opposed to Windows or even Mac OSX and some other flavors of Unix. Linux package management makes system administration of servers so much more organized and clean. And I loved it on my Desktop too. I had my wife running Kubuntu for a while, all I did was show her the package management tool and she got her system running the apps she needed without any help.
Windows kind of has the add/remove software option in the control panel. But calling this package management would be like calling telnet an ssh client.
User Experience
In general, I miss Linux. I want my options, I want my tools (Konsole! Where’s my Konsole!), I want my security and I want my stability. There were some things that just took getting used to, but there are more things that I would always long for.
Windows has Internet Explorer, which is an advantage. Unfortunately there are still some websites that will not work in Firefox, usually because they rely on activex stuff. In Linux I had to remote desktop to a windows box to use those sites.
Linux has a real SSH client. There is nothing comparable to Konsole or Multi-Gnome Terminal. This actually hurts my productivity, since I manage 50 or so Linux servers. I require tabs, and input binding. There’s nothing that even $500 could get you that is comparable to the Linux terminal tools. The closest thing I have found is the PuTTY Connection Manager… And it has some nice functionality, a bit buggy at times, but at least it has tabs and lets me organize hosts in to groups. I have promised the developer cookies if he adds a bind all input option, we’ll see.
And finally… I would compare Bash to windows cmd, but… well… yeah.
28 Responses to “Windows Vista VS Linux”
By Archie on Nov 30, 2007 | Reply
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Windows_Vista_VS_Linux_2
Nice article Ryan.
By lowkey on Nov 30, 2007 | Reply
For Shadow Copy/Restore on Linux look into Rsnapshot.
It uses rsync to keep backup copies of whatever directories you configure it for.
Rsnapshot uses hardlinks to store the files so if a file hasn’t changed then only one copy of it exists.
Then its a simple matter of enabling cron jobs to run every day or every hour if you want.
Restore is as easy as copying the files back.
By Maarten Kooiker on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
Very nice article! Finally someone that is not all-negative about Vista. Maybe I should give it a try…. Or maybe I’ll just stick to GNU/Linux….
Cheers,
Maarten
By george on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
For a really nice demonstration of this “i want my options” mentality, open the Options screen of Miranda IM. Does that help the user? Yeah.. in a quirky “I’m in no hurry” sort of way.. Come on.. the balance?
By James Manning on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
If you’re going to stay in Windows, do yourself a favor and stop using cmd as your shell and use PowerShell – http://www.microsoft.com/powershell
I run Vista, win2k3, and Ubuntu at home (on different machines, no dual booting), and PowerShell definitely makes life a lot better for me on Windows machines.
By Tom on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
OS X actually has two different package managers. You may argue that it doesn’t do regular OS X apps, but for server usage that’s fairly irrelevant.
Check out http://darwinports.com/ and http://fink.sf.net
By Eric on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
WOW lets have another article to bash Vista/Windows.
(a very biased comment)
The UI for KDE and Gnome has been virtually the
same for what seven or eight years? Besides add ing tools for management. The way you used both has been the same for ages.
You are absolutely on crack if you think its easier to manage drivers in Linux! It is so much easier to search the internet for hours to find a printer driver that some guy in korea wrote. Then I have recomplie the kernel to get it to work.
If it takes 30 minutes for your laptop to wake up then you need a new laptop. My laptop take about 1 minute to wake up and connect to my wireless network.
Do drivers work all the time in Windows? No
But you can say that for any operating system. Linux would be on the top of my list for problematic drivers.
Please don’t compare the add and removing of applications with Windows. You are really showing your bias when you try to say adding and removing application is a better experience then in windows.
Granted the UAC is a pain in the ass.
But they kind of had to do something other than continue down the same path with security.
As far as backward compatibility goes what other OS lets you run many application at are more than 10 years old? Trust me is does because I do. At best this comparison is a push.
didn’t realize this was so long…..
By dafire on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
you could always install cygwin to get a bash and many other linux tools
By Ryan Hadley on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
I tried… Cygwin on Vista didn’t go too well. It has this forking problem where 1 out of every 5 or so forks fail.
By Bones on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
Use http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page for that one web site that requires Internet Explorer.
By karl fast on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
Try these:
Ponderosa: a tabbed terminal emulutor. SSH and cygwin/bash shells. Free.
http://en.poderosa.org/
Console: a tabbed shell, windows shell and cygwin/bash. open source and free.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/
By Dustin Sanders on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
Nice article, I’m a hard core [k]ubutnu user, and it generally pains me to use windows. But I’ve been using vista on my tablet for several months now. I agree with most of your comments, although never used the shadow copy.. I probably should, I’ve had to redo some code several times cause vista magically misplaced the files. *shrug* I threaten to format and throw Linux on my tablet, but then i remember there’s hardly any tablet functions in Linux =(.
By Ryan Hadley on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
Both Ponderosa and Console fail to provide an input binding feature. This is the essential feature I’m missing in all windows clients.
By Robert Pogson on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
Nice article, but there are a couple of points:
1)Ctrl-c, etc. are ancient ASCII codes and are not M$ specific. I used them on ASR teletypes in the 1970s… I use them all the time when editing. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctrl-C
2)I do a fair amount of sysadmin stuff, and cannot imagine M$ is any improvement over GNU/Linux except for those lacking imagination. If GNU/Linux has any fault, it is that there are several methods of doing everything while M$ gives you one, whether it works well or not. For backup I can use dd for nearly-full partitions, tar czf for most filesystems and directories, rsync, keep a repository and package lists and backup only /etc.
apt-cache search backup finds 124 hits in Debian Etch, including Amanda, Bacula and Mondo.
Face it. M$ is limiting. If you depend on their stuff and they break it, you are up the creek. They have been breaking stuff for many years. Look how they abuse their monopoly. It is best to avoid the bully no matter how tidy the package may look.
By Dark Phoenix on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
“ou are absolutely on crack if you think its easier to manage drivers in Linux! It is so much easier to search the internet for hours to find a printer driver that some guy in korea wrote.”
Windows people still seem to cling to the retarded belief that the only way to work drivers in an OS is to search the Internet for them. Another “innovation” from Microsoft.
And uh, you claim it’s better to search the Internet over and over again looking for programs to provide what you really should get out of the box, as opposed to having one program you can turn to all the time to get what you need? You’re the one who’s on crack.
By cruzsehr on Dec 1, 2007 | Reply
well, if vista is as good as you so declared, how come xp is selling better than vista. Or maybe you’re not that good with linux.
I’m windows free for many years now.
Good luck with Vista.
By Brendan Scott on Dec 2, 2007 | Reply
ctrl-c/ctrl-v works on linux [4 me; mostly]
By vexorian on Dec 2, 2007 | Reply
What the? I do have ctrl+c and ctrl+v in Linux…
By Ryan Hadley on Dec 2, 2007 | Reply
Yes, I should have been more clear.
ctrl-c/ctrl-v works most of the time in Linux. The “select to copy” and “middle click to paste” always works too, and this is what throws me off sometimes. Sometimes I accidentally click and drag in a window and select text didn’t plan on selecting, which goes in to my cut buffer… usually without my knowledge.
I much prefer having to perform an extra action, besides selecting text, to put something in my cut buffer.
By Sympatico on Dec 2, 2007 | Reply
Linux has a versioning filesystem … well, several actually according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versioning_file_system …
I was thinking in particular of ext3cow, see
http://www.ext3cow.com/
According to Freshmeat it is in Beta; I seem to recall one of the developers saying it is stable.
By Ponchito on Dec 2, 2007 | Reply
I can’t really understand what is the point of this post. Looks to me like an endorsement to Windows Vista. In real life it really sucks. Having escaped the Microsoft ties some three years ago, I haven’t seen the need to go back to the cream of the crap.
By Ryan Hadley on Dec 2, 2007 | Reply
Vista has done some good things for the windows world, like user access control. But it’s still, for my needs, far behind linux.
If you mean you’re confused about if I think Vista is better than XP? I have no clue… I’ve used Vista now longer than I’ve ever used XP. But I would think the addition alone of User Access Control would make me favor Vista over XP. My experience with XP has been people complaining to me that their machine is too slow and I have to scrape out all the spyware and viruses for them… which UAC will help prevent.
By Mike Schwager on Dec 2, 2007 | Reply
Hi,
I don’t know what input binding is, but if you want a really nice SSH client on Windows, use SecureCRT. It’s not even close to 500 bucks! I prefer it, I have to say, to any other SSH terminal/client (that includes native Linux and UNIX clients). …And I’ve been a UNIX geek since 1983. Go to http://www.vandyke.com .
I have no relationship to the company, I’m just a satisfied user. IMHO, VanDyke understands what a UNIX guy- who uses Windows to connect to his machines- really needs.
-Mike
By Ryan Hadley on Dec 2, 2007 | Reply
Input binding is where you open a bunch of tabs and bind all input to all tabs to one tab. So, in that one master tab, everything you type gets typed in all the others. It’s a freaking life saver when you’re managing 50 nearly identical machines.
By PuTTY Connection Manager admin on Dec 14, 2007 | Reply
Next version of PuTTY Connection Manager will add full support for all PuTTY command-line arguments (current version has somes bugs with specific SSH commands for example). You then should be able to use SSH tunnelling for instance…
Upcoming version (0.6) will be releasing until the end of the year.
PuTTY Connection Manager team.
By Colaloca on Feb 1, 2008 | Reply
It seems you’re a skilled Linux power user, but you aren’t more than an eventual Windows user.
I mean, your article is similar to those agressive rants I use to read about Vista.
I’d suggest everyone coming from Linux just reading the manual. You’re all so used to not having any manuals that aren’t aware of Microsoft’s knowledge base.
By Ryan Hadley on Feb 1, 2008 | Reply
Ummm…
http://www.linuxmanpages.com/
http://www.howtoforge.com/
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/
So I don’t know where this whole “not having manuals” for Linux idea comes from.
And please, if you can show me how Microsoft’s knowledge base would solve any of my frustrations with Vista that I mentioned above, tell me. Don’t keep such secrets to yourself.