5 Things Linux Does Better Than Mac OS X

[Pieter3dnow]

DX10 and 11 isn't native on linux yet. It is apparently going to happen in the future...possibly like the desktop year, or possibly not, but through wine. Steam for mac is some kind of expensive joke. It is not AAA games, just half life mods and casual/puzzle games. This weeks specials, only 8% are mac (and windows too, no exclusives yet). The AAA games on the front page are all windows only. Same with the upcoming releases, 1 valve and 1 casual game aside 100% windows only. Its one of the reasons it took off to start with.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mesa_gallium3d_d3d11&num=1

"Direct3D 10/11 Is Now Natively Implemented On Linux!"

Enjoy

 

[H@RD5]

OMFGNOWAI!

 

[LoneWolf]

Agreed, this is just a stupid flame-bait article. OS X crashes constantly? That must be like when Apple fanbois tell everyone that Windows 7 crashes constantly i.e. they're making it up.

+1.

I can't stand garbage articles like this just trolling for bites. While I generally run Windows, I've used OS X plenty, and stability is just fine. Security is reasonable, so is cutomization.

Price is a real flame-baiter. Linux is free compared to Windows and plenty of other operating systems too --what's your point? If I wanted to offer constructive criticism of Apple or the Mac platform, I'd have much better points, and they'd be fair.


Obvious troll article is obvious.

 

[3far4shot]

like Windows--is very restrictive in the hardware that it will work with, requiring pretty much the latest and greatest hardware to run well. Try it on anything less, and you'll pay the price.

lol wtf..

 

[Ryokurin]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mesa_gallium3d_d3d11&num=1

"Direct3D 10/11 Is Now Natively Implemented On Linux!"

Enjoy

A big piece of DirectX, but still missing DirectDraw, Direct2D, DirectWrite, DirectInput, DirectPlay, DirectSound, DirectSound3D and on and on. Basically they can run some Direct3D demos right now. Games? That's going to be some time, and be like Wine, it may work and it may not.

 

[Lord_Anselhelm]

I'll be the first to admit that I'm generally not a fan of Apple products, especially whilst Steve Jobs is controlling the company with the help of his Reality Distortion Field, but even I feel the need to call bullshit on this article.

In fact, though I may use Windows 7 myself (as it does what I want an operating system to do and doesn't lack anything I need), I respect those who legitimately prefer Macs for OSX, so long as they bought it for informed reasons and not aesthetics, style or other insensible reasons.

This sort of arrogance makes me want to join up with Apple fans and bash Linux. Yes: I'm actually suggesting an alliance between Windows users and OSX users to hit back at Linux.

As a geek, yes, I should prefer Linux, but I'm a practical person. When the Linux community loses its obsession with bitching at the competition and unifies under a single banner to make an OS which anyone can use without having to use the console (except for power users... and no, installing programs or drivers doesn't make you a power user!), then I'll consider Linux to have come of age. Right now, it's still stuck in pre-adolescence.

 

[Ashbringer]

A big piece of DirectX, but still missing DirectDraw, Direct2D, DirectWrite, DirectInput, DirectPlay, DirectSound, DirectSound3D and on and on. Basically they can run some Direct3D demos right now. Games? That's going to be some time, and be like Wine, it may work and it may not.

I think you're missing the whole point. They didn't want to run everything DirectX, just the 3D part. This is to help Linux developers port Windows code over to Linux, without the need to rewrite their graphics code. This helps bridge the gap between Linux and Windows a bit, in game development.

This also helps dramatically in Wine as well. Took forever for Wine to support DX9, and even then it's extremely slow and buggy. Only Windows applications that use OpenGL will work fine, and perform fine, cause you avoid the Direct3D -> OpenGL wrapper, which just adds overhead. With Direct3D being native to Linux, you won't have to deal with performance issues or bugs with Wine.

From what I understand, the new system that going to implement DX10/DX11 is going to make it easier to add new APIs in the future, without the need to write new drivers. They do this with what they call "states". So, if they wanted to implement DirectDraw, or Direct2D, they could do so by adding a "state" into the kernel somewhere.

If you wish you could go to linux, but it lacks games and decided to stick to Windows, this is a drastic push to fix that. Of course, for now it aims to bring Windows games to Linux through wine, but in the future we'll eventually see native Linux games using Direct3D instead of OpenGL.

 

[Exitwound]

At the walk-in helpdesk at my job, where staff, grad students, and faculty come for help with their computers, for every 5 that come in, 4 are macs. 40% of the Department is Mac too.

 

[ryken]

2010 Guide to Getting a High Hit Count on your Article:

1. Glorify Apple beyond what is reasonable
2. Demonize Apple beyond what is reasonable

 

[Ryokurin]

I think you're missing the whole point. They didn't want to run everything DirectX, just the 3D part. This is to help Linux developers port Windows code over to Linux, without the need to rewrite their graphics code. This helps bridge the gap between Linux and Windows a bit, in game development.

This also helps dramatically in Wine as well. Took forever for Wine to support DX9, and even then it's extremely slow and buggy. Only Windows applications that use OpenGL will work fine, and perform fine, cause you avoid the Direct3D -> OpenGL wrapper, which just adds overhead. With Direct3D being native to Linux, you won't have to deal with performance issues or bugs with Wine.

From what I understand, the new system that going to implement DX10/DX11 is going to make it easier to add new APIs in the future, without the need to write new drivers. They do this with what they call "states". So, if they wanted to implement DirectDraw, or Direct2D, they could do so by adding a "state" into the kernel somewhere.

If you wish you could go to linux, but it lacks games and decided to stick to Windows, this is a drastic push to fix that. Of course, for now it aims to bring Windows games to Linux through wine, but in the future we'll eventually see native Linux games using Direct3D instead of OpenGL.

No, I got it, but everyone else seemed to interpret it as meaning they'll be able to run windows games in linux soon as if it was written natively for it, or that Linux will support more standards than windows does now ( ) Even what you are stating is only going to lightly help programmers port as they then will have to port their sound to ALSA or whatever and deal with all that BS, or figure out a new way to deal with networking capabilities and so forth. Graphics wasn't the major sticking point on getting games ported, it's the rest of the system, especially sound.

 

[Exavior]

wow, that article sucked greatly imo.

first off from the security standpoint. All OSs now function in a similar manor when it comes to doing something that needs admin rights. Both OS x and Linux require you to type in an your password. Windows will just let you continue if you are already logged in as an admin. But the whole linux doesn't have your account setup as an admin is pointless as you can setup limited accounts in all 3 and require an admin (root) account be used to do anything that needs admin rights. Last i checked you setup root and a second account for most linux installs, just do the same for windows or your OS X install, create your main admin account and then create yourself a limited account right afterwords.

He might also want to explain his Reliability section more also. Most NEVER expeirence downtime, really NEVER? So then their hardware NEVER fails under a linux system? Let skip hardware and focus on software. Nobody ever has their linux server crash on them for any reason and has their services go down for any period of time. I've seen it happen, and have heard people bitch about it happen.


As for price. not every version of linux is free. Once you get Red Hat you have to keep paying every year othewise you are no longer able to get any patches for your install or get any support. I actually had somebody tell me that your weren't supposed to be using it any more but i did see where you can keep using it, you just can't upgrade it.

I have to agree with a few others here, sounds like just another linux fanboy to me. Is linux fine for you if it meets your needs, yes. Is it perfect in every single way, no.

 

[WaltC]

(Warning--long post--heh... Gotta' cut down on the caffeine!)

Wow. While it's been obvious to me for awhile that PC World is often biased in its observations and statements, this article is one of the publication's most biased and erroneous to date. It deserves a point-by-point refutation.

Before I get started, though, did anyone else notice the weirdness of the article's title, "5 Things Linux Does Better than Mac OS X"? First it's a little weird because saying "Mac OS X" is redundant--the only platform which Apple allows OS X to run on is Apple's own proprietary PC, nostalgically called a "Mac"--proprietary because Apple ties OS X to its Apple hardware. Apple doesn't sell any standalone OS to the larger software markets that Microsoft and all of the Linux distributions compete in. Next, the title gets very weird because it doesn't mention Microsoft or Windows, and yet Noyes talks constantly about Windows throughout the article. (I always instinctively mistrust the bait 'n switch.)

Were it not for Windows' long-standing installed base and overwhelming market dominance, it seems unlikely that anyone would argue seriously for the merit of the operating system, plagued as it is by high prices, security problems and vendor lock-in.

What an amazing lead paragraph. It's so redolent of error and prejudice that I had to force myself to read on. I kept reading, though, more out of a sense of the macabre than anything else--like when I pass by an automobile wreck and for some reason instinctively crane my neck to try and catch a quick glimpse of the wreck.

High prices? Gosh, does she mean that Windows isn't free, I wonder? I would guess so.

http://www.ubuntu.com/how-can-it-be-free

They don't charge for the copy of the OS itself. What they charge for is the training, support and consultation a business will no doubt require after it has been hooked by the "free" downloads.

But Red Hat does it a bit differently:

https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/desktop/

They sell you service and support when you buy the OS at prices that just as "high" as those you might pay for Windows. If you want more detailed, intense service and support, you can always pay Red Hat more, on top of the OS price, to get it.

KDE is apparently "free" as well, and I thought this link to the KDE download and build page was very informative:

http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE4

Yep--I mean as far as ease of installation and setup goes, KDE just makes things so much simpler than either OS X or Windows, doesn't it? Why of course it does. Any dummy knows that "if it's free it's just got to be better." Right? Sure...

About security, it seems to me that Microsoft has gone to great lengths to close security holes in Windows first in Vista, and then with Windows 7. Later in the article, Noyes states:

Research firm Secunia recently found that Apple now "outshines" even Windows in the number of security vulnerabilities associated with its products.

That's likely true, as far as it goes, but what Noyes strangely doesn't mention is that Secunia reported on the theoretical holes and "vulnerabilities" it found. Basically, Secunia reports on the number of "advisories" it issues to companies and then compares that data with the actual patches these companies create specifically to cover the issues raised in the Secunia advisories. It's Secunia's business to try and find every OS hole it can find, even the tiniest and least likely to ever manifest under conditions that do not actually occur for 99% of the people using the given OS that Secunia is probing. It's the OS vendor's job, otoh, to patch the holes it deems worthy of a patch--and that doesn't mean following Secunia's advisories blindly. Overall, It seems to me that it really doesn't matter which OS you use today, the security thereof is primarily a matter of either operator prudence or operator negligence and error.

Next is "vendor lock in," which is a phrase Noyes uses to describe some unidentified, presumably negative facet of Windows, but when I followed the link she provides...

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/search?p=vendor lock-in

...I didn't see anything there that might be construed as a negative for Windows. Most of the articles referenced by Noyes' link talked about Novell's upcoming Cloud Manager software. Indeed, the following quote comes from a PC World article written just a couple of weeks ago...

With a single management console, companies may be more likely to use a mix of hypervisors based on their needs, said Ben Grubin, director of data center management at Novell.

"What this allows you to do is make infrastructure choices based on what you need to do to support your business services, rather than trying to maintain a single unified stack," he said.

Microsoft is moving in a similar direction. Its Systems Center software can manage VMware as well as Hyper-V environments today, and Microsoft has said the next version, due next year, will manage Citrix XenServer as well. VMware's tools can manage only its own hypervisors.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2053..._private_cloud_vendor_lockin.html?tk=rss_news

Now for the meat and potatoes... (Hey, it's Saturday and what else have I got to do before football?)

1. Security

....First is the question of permissions: Linux users are not automatically given administrator privileges on their computers, meaning that viruses and malware don't automatically have access to everything in the proverbial "castle." So, when a computer is compromised, the most the malware can typically do is trash the user's local files and programs.

With Apple, on the other hand--as with Windows--social engineering is painfully easy. Just convince the user to click on something, and away you go, with the castle keys in hand...

I covered the security angle above, but I feel compelled to point out that when a primary user (short for "owner of the computer") installs an OS, the point of giving him full control of the OS is so that he has full control of the OS. It's not pleasant to think about having to jump through hoops just to move, copy, delete or save files, and so on. And then with Windows, beginning with Vista, Microsoft introduced UAC (User Account Control) which some don't object to and others turn off (it doesn't bother me.) The whole purpose of UAC is to allow the operator to decide what runs in the environment and what doesn't.

The "social engineering" comment is just bizarre. That sort of thing has literally nothing to do with an OS. That's the province of the operator. It's not the fault of the OS if you're an individual who can be duped into various scams and schemes. How could it be? As the operators of our computing environments, we are the guiding intelligence behind them.

I also don't quite comprehend what Noyes sees as so trivial in the matter of a compromised Linux "trashing the user's local files and programs." Is that supposed to reassure me of Linux's inherent security superiority? Heh... I'm afraid not.

Last here--it's a trivial matter requiring a few seconds to setup under Windows non-primary user accounts which do not allow the non-primary user full control of the OS, so that, social engineering included, the user cannot hand over the "keys to the castle," even if it is his intent to do so. This is something else that Noyes has no business not knowing.

With Linux, on the other hand, there is a world of users examining the code every day. No wonder, then, that Linux vulnerabilities can be found and fixed more quickly.

I want to state that I have no prejudice against Linux. None whatsoever. I think the distros are very cool and there's a lot to play with in terms of configuration--which is a plus for me. I do, however, have a problem with people who twist and distort reality in order to fit it into their narrow little agendas. Sure, there is a "world of users examining the code every day," but that very same "openness" also presents an invitation to a world of hackers examining the code every day and looking to burrow their way in, if not directly seeking to write in a backdoor somewhere. While she talks about the speed at which Linux vulnerabilities are caught and patched, Noyes seems blind to the notion that for the same reason Linux holes may be exploited a lot faster, too. This would seem to be common sense.

2. Customizability

I can understand that there are some users who want to live in a walled garden, and are content to do things the way Apple wants them to. For the rest of us, however, the restrictions Apple puts on the user are just unacceptable.

With Linux, virtually everything is customizable and configurable, so that you can make pretty much everything the way you want it to be. Don't like the GNOME desktop that Ubuntu comes with? Try KDE then--or another one! The choice really is yours, as it should be.

I can't find fault with this sentiment. I was surprised to see she left out Microsoft/Windows in discussing this particular topic, though...

The ability to customize everything is great--no doubt about it. By the same token, there are people out there who don't understand the relationship between a screen icon and its corresponding directory or program or link, etc. These people need the standardization of lots of things, especially GUI elements, to help them better learn how their computing environment works. The problem with considering "choice" in matters like these is that a great number of people would have no idea about what they should choose, given the choice. Apple's OS X approach to providing overall configurability is far more restrictive than is true for Windows, so possibly this is why Noyes didn't bring in the topic of Microsoft here.

3. Hardware

Hand-in-hand with the question of flexibility is the fact that OS X--like Windows--is very restrictive in the hardware that it will work with, requiring pretty much the latest and greatest hardware to run well. Try it on anything less, and you'll pay the price.

One of Linux's most endearing virtues, on the other hand, is its capability to run on just about anything. In fact, there are even distributions of Linux designed for really limited computing environments, such as Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux.

With OS X, Apple tells you what hardware you must have; with Linux, you tell it what you've got and go from there.

Hate to say it but this is pure bunk--almost completely false (I used "almost" to be polite.) Windows is the farthest thing on Earth away from being "very restrictive in the hardware that it will work with." Just go shopping one day in any computer/electronics store and see if you can find a single piece of computer hardware or peripheral for sale that "won't work with Windows".... There aren't any that I know of.

Windows "requires" the "latest and greatest" hardware in order to run? Hardly. I just installed Win7 on a six-year old box that has anything but "the latest and greatest" hardware inside and it runs fine. Windows not only supports "the latest and greatest" hardware, it also supports a lot of hardware so old it creaks. The problem here relative to Linux, which Noyes dances around and pretty much prevaricates about, is that it is Linux distros that typically do not support "the latest and greatest" hardware. Why?

All hardware devices in a computer need drivers of some kind. When a device OEM, like for instance ATi/AMD or nVidia, brings a 3d card to market, the OEM is responsible for actually writing the drivers that support the device under the OSes the manufacturer plans to support. Windows, having >90% worldwide market share, is generally always supported by OEMs. OS X, with a worldwide market share of approximately <5%, accordingly draws far fewer OEM drivers than Windows, because of OS X's comparatively very small market share.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=11

In the above-linked chart, Linux doesn't even make it into the top 5 OSes used in terms of market share. The point is that hardware OEMs have little incentive to spend time and money developing Linux drivers for their devices simply because the Linux share of the OS market is practically microscopic in comparison with Windows, and smaller even than OS X's market share.

Apple, being primarily a hardware company, includes driver support only for the short list of the hardware components Apple ships inside its Mac PCs. Microsoft, with Windows, is in a fundamentally different business. Microsoft doesn't manufacture or sell its own brand of computers, so Microsoft has to team with hardware OEMs to ensure that Windows will run on everything made--including Apple's Mac PCs. Simply put, if Noyes' contention that Windows "is very restrictive in the hardware that it will work with" was in fact true, then Windows wouldn't have anything close to the >90% market share the OS has. Instead, the Windows' market share would be much closer to the Mac PC's, or to the sum total of all Linux distros combined--which is actually less than OS X's market share.

According to this site I just pulled up through Google, Linux market share worldwide is hovering at just over 1%, although another site I saw listed it as 1.52%:

http://www.ghabuntu.com/2010/02/extremes-of-linux-market-share.html

The author in the above piece talks about the fact that although the Linux desktop market share is abysmally low, the fact is that Linux of some stripe is used in many a server--and I'd surely agree with that. But as a desktop? There are a lot of reasons why its market share is so low, and one of them is sort of a self-fulfilling, chicken-and-egg prophecy: hardware drivers--Linux won't grow until its direct support by hardware OEMs picks up dramatically on the driver front, but that's not going to happen until the Linux share of the market rises substantially.

To that end lots of people are "rolling their own" drivers for Linux, and trying to go open source for driver development when they can. This is regrettably an older link, but it does explain what is going on with driver development for Linux:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/7636

At any rate, driver support for Linux is critical to its development, and substantial growth in market share will not occur until general Linux driver development rises substantially from present levels. Following right on the heels of driver development is application support--which is just as critical for Linux to grow.

4. Reliability

Systems crashes and downtime are pretty much a fact of life when you're a Mac user, but Linux offers a completely different experience. Many Linux users, in fact, have never experienced unplanned downtime. No wonder, then, Linux is so often the operating system of choice on servers. What business can afford unnecessary downtime these days?

I think Linux boxes make great servers, as I said, but there are a few things Noyes dances around here, too. First of all, she begins the piece by talking explicitly about desktop Linux in relation to desktop Mac OS X. But when she moves to server Linux, she's talking about the server Linux product, and has already moved away from Linux desktop, and of course, from OS X. When computers crash it often has to do with the applications that are running--it doesn't follow at all that "system crashes and downtime" are a way of life for Mac users--if that were true I imagine the Mac PC's market share would be as low as, or lower than, desktop Linux...

Server OSes like server-version Linux go through a lot pruning and optimization to specifically run server-grade software, usually limited and specialized server applications that can easily cost upwards of thousands of dollars, and in many instances aren't comparable to general-purpose Linux desktop OSes at all. So the point she makes, while true, is moot because the server versions of Linux are different animals altogether than their Linux desktop cousins, and the hardware and software in Linux server boxes, apart from Linux itself, is far and away more specialized and expensive than the hardware and software you'd find in a typical desktop Linux box. Or running Windows or OS X.

5. Price

It almost seems too easy to point this out, but, well, Linux is free. Macs? Not so much--they're even higher-priced than Windows machines, in fact.[/quote]

Technically, I suppose, it is "free," but the support that it requires from the software vendors who sell it is anything but free. And that's as it should be, since the companies who sell Linux distros have got to eat and pay the bills, don't they?

And at Red Hat, server software "support" costs quite a bit more than desktop support:

https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/

I can get the server software for one machine with up to two cpu sockets, and get RH's one-year basic support package for a mere $349, or I could get their one year standard level of support for that one machine for $799, or could go all out for one year and get their premium support for one box for $1,299. Yea, sure, if I opted for RH's premium support on ten, two-socket servers, I could get it for the highway-robbery price of just $12,999 per year--excluding the cost of the server, server applications I'll need to buy, personnel to oversee the servers, etc. Yea, can't get much closer to "free" than that!

Sure, there are proprietary vendors who will try to convince you that Linux's long-term total cost of ownership is higher. That, however, is just a myth. For one thing, as I've noted before, such arguments typically don't factor in the cost of being locked in with a particular vendor.

I'd very much like to know what Noyes means exactly by "locked in" with a particular vendor. I mean, if I go the Red Hat server subscription, I'm pretty much "locked in" with them for the duration of the subscription, aren't I?

There are also numerous studies confirming Linux's cost advantages. Then, of course, there's all the anecdotal evidence in the form of governments and organizations around the globe turning to Linux in growing numbers every day.

Yes, and the studies are all done by companies hoping to sell their own custom Linux packages and/or distros, for the most part. OK, so what about the anecdotal evidence of the many governments and organizations still using Microsoft software today? It's tempting to forget them, but not too terribly enlightening.

No operating system is perfect, of course. But Linux has so many advantages over its desktop competitors that any business enterprise would be remiss not to give it a chance.

See...Noyes starts the article talking about desktop Linux and then halfway through shifts gears into server Linux, while still making comparisons to desktop Windows and desktop OS X all the way through.

What I wish Noyes would have done was to have answered one single and I think crucially important question: why, after all these years, and the fact that it is supposed to be "free," and the fact that it is supposed to be open source, is total Linux desktop distribution hovering at a dismal ~1% of the entire market?

She could answer that question by taking a long, hard look at what is wrong and unappealing about Linux desktop distros in comparison with the other OSes available! It's not enough to be an advocate for something--if you don't understand why the product isn't succeeding like you think it should, then it's very likely that you really don't see the picture clearly. Amazingly, Linux desktop distros seem to be products that their distributors literally cannot give away.

 

[GunSpeed]

Sorry, my only contribution to the author of that article is this :


MOVE ALONG TROLL...


But my real respond would be to /ignore it!

 

[Pieter3dnow]

No, I got it, but everyone else seemed to interpret it as meaning they'll be able to run windows games in linux soon as if it was written natively for it, or that Linux will support more standards than windows does now ( ) Even what you are stating is only going to lightly help programmers port as they then will have to port their sound to ALSA or whatever and deal with all that BS, or figure out a new way to deal with networking capabilities and so forth. Graphics wasn't the major sticking point on getting games ported, it's the rest of the system, especially sound.

No because everyone knows that is hardly possible, but i is another step in the right direction regarding somewhat of a more friendly environment where windows games have a higher change running on Linux and never as fast as on windows , but the average Linux wouldn't care that much about that anyway (happy enough with the support).

 

[Runningflame570]

WaltC's post unfortunately is only notable for its length and wrong-headedness, there is far more in it which is utterly wrong or laughable than there is containing a kernel of truth, which is unfortunate.

High prices? Gosh, does she mean that Windows isn't free, I wonder? I would guess so.

http://www.ubuntu.com/how-can-it-be-free

They don't charge for the copy of the OS itself. What they charge for is the training, support and consultation a business will no doubt require after it has been hooked by the "free" downloads.

But Red Hat does it a bit differently:

https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/desktop/

They sell you service and support when you buy the OS at prices that just as "high" as those you might pay for Windows. If you want more detailed, intense service and support, you can always pay Red Hat more, on top of the OS price, to get it.

It's not especially difficult to understand actually. Using the OS is free, paid commercial support is available as an option after that. If it wasn't available you would be using that to complain about.

Even those which don't make theirs available in binary form without paid support contracts (which means almost no one outside of Red Hat and Novell) you'll find ready equivalents in CentOS and OpenSuse.

You really never need to pay to use Linux unless you choose to. With Windows you do unless you're willing to break the law. Simple.

KDE is apparently "free" as well, and I thought this link to the KDE download and build page was very informative:

http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE4

Yep--I mean as far as ease of installation and setup goes, KDE just makes things so much simpler than either OS X or Windows, doesn't it? Why of course it does. Any dummy knows that "if it's free it's just got to be better." Right? Sure...

Ahh, this old crock. I'll direct your attention here: http://www.kde.org/download/distributions.php

That is a list of popular distributions which ship KDE by default and it does not include the literally dozens of others that make it available to install through repositories. No building from source here!

Unless you're a masochist of course, or you know..someone trying to pretend they're impartial while they're anything but.

About security, it seems to me that Microsoft has gone to great lengths to close security holes in Windows first in Vista, and then with Windows 7. Later in the article,

Which is not being denied, but also does not suddenly make them more secure than Linux (much less FreeBSD), nor does it make them more secure than Mac. Mac's (theoretical) security is worse than Windows because Jobs and Co. are negligent about security, plain and simple.

That's likely true, as far as it goes, but what Noyes strangely doesn't mention is that Secunia reported on the theoretical holes and "vulnerabilities" it found. Basically, Secunia reports on the number of "advisories" it issues to companies and then compares that data with the actual patches these companies create specifically to cover the issues raised in the Secunia advisories. It's Secunia's business to try and find every OS hole it can find, even the tiniest and least likely to ever manifest under conditions that do not actually occur for 99% of the people using the given OS that Secunia is probing. It's the OS vendor's job, otoh, to patch the holes it deems worthy of a patch--and that doesn't mean following Secunia's advisories blindly. Overall, It seems to me that it really doesn't matter which OS you use today, the security thereof is primarily a matter of either operator prudence or operator negligence and error.

I'll add that Secunia themselves I believe caution against comparing simple advisory numbers and doing so is fraught with difficulties. At the same time I'll note that whatever the reasons (and they are certainly argued back and forth a ton, something I won't engage in here) practically speaking Linux is more secure than Windows.

Next is "vendor lock in," which is a phrase Noyes uses to describe some unidentified, presumably negative facet of Windows, but when I followed the link she provides...

Another rather simple concept. Microsoft utilizes incompatible formats (mht, activex, doc, vml, jscript, etc.) and refuses to support compatible formats (svg) or supports formats poorly or in an incompatible way (png, odf).

They do this in order to lock people into using their software and make it prohibitively expensive or impossible to switch to a competing vendor. At best you can say that they don't care about interoperability, but their efforts at deliberately breaking compatibility have been documented in the past and they drag their feet on every effort at interoperability.

Software vendors have done this for ages, whether you're talking Microsoft, or AutoDesk, or Adobe, or the older Unix vendors. It's great for whoever corners the market first, but terrible for everyone (and I do mean everyone) else.

This isn't an issue for Linux. It's not a new concept, it's not a difficult concept, and it's not one I think there should be any actual difficulty understanding.

I covered the security angle above, but I feel compelled to point out that when a primary user (short for "owner of the computer") installs an OS, the point of giving him full control of the OS is so that he has full control of the OS. It's not pleasant to think about having to jump through hoops just to move, copy, delete or save files, and so on. And then with Windows, beginning with Vista, Microsoft introduced UAC (User Account Control) which some don't object to and others turn off (it doesn't bother me.) The whole purpose of UAC is to allow the operator to decide what runs in the environment and what doesn't.

Your argument is invalid. There is a tradeoff between security and ease of use it is true, however one shouldn't be writing files willy-nilly to important system directories to begin with and that is the only situation in which moving files will run into problems on any modern OS.

UAC is also unfortunately little more than an advertising bullet point. It was implemented extremely poorly to begin with (even more so in Windows 7) and Microsoft themselves have forsworn it as a security feature when pressed on this point.

The "social engineering" comment is just bizarre. That sort of thing has literally nothing to do with an OS. That's the province of the operator.

Actually agreed for once.

I also don't quite comprehend what Noyes sees as so trivial in the matter of a compromised Linux "trashing the user's local files and programs." Is that supposed to reassure me of Linux's inherent security superiority? Heh... I'm afraid not.

Last here--it's a trivial matter requiring a few seconds to setup under Windows non-primary user accounts which do not allow the non-primary user full control of the OS, so that, social engineering included, the user cannot hand over the "keys to the castle," even if it is his intent to do so.

Well you can have one user's files trashed or you can have all users on the system with their files trashed, the root/admin user backdoored and the system serving as a botnet C&C server. I know which I prefer.

The default behavior on Windows remains to not require any sort of password to perform actions with admin-level privileges. As the default behavior that will be how things typically are for 99%+ percent of people out there.

That is unacceptable from a security PoV.

I want to state that I have no prejudice against Linux. None whatsoever. I think the distros are very cool and there's a lot to play with in terms of configuration--which is a plus for me. I do, however, have a problem with people who twist and distort reality in order to fit it into their narrow little agendas. Sure, there is a "world of users examining the code every day," but that very same "openness" also presents an invitation to a world of hackers examining the code every day and looking to burrow their way in, if not directly seeking to write in a backdoor somewhere. While she talks about the speed at which Linux vulnerabilities are caught and patched, Noyes seems blind to the notion that for the same reason Linux holes may be exploited a lot faster, too. This would seem to be common sense.

Needless to say I have considerable doubts about your first statement here.

This entire bit of your post though is notable for how utterly, completely, horrifically wrong it is on IT security. Security through obscurity (at least in this sense) is no security at all. People don't take a glance at code and magically determine what sort of vulnerabilities it has. Far more vulnerabilities are found through fuzzing, in other words through poking at the system and seeing how it reacts.

The only thing attempting to keep code proprietary does, aside from drive up the cost of entry to using the software is prevent the sort of network effects in triangulating and expunging vulnerabilities which are present. Thats because unlike malware authors, most people/companies tend to obey the law which in this case doesn't allow them to patch the software themselves.

Proprietary software is like DRM, it only hurts the good guys.

The ability to customize everything is great--no doubt about it. By the same token, there are people out there who don't understand the relationship between a screen icon and its corresponding directory or program or link, etc. These people need the standardization of lots of things, especially GUI elements, to help them better learn how their computing environment works.

Which you'll find in GNOME and KDE both. Prior to KDE 4, KDE had changed extremely little GUI-wise for a half decade. The same can be said of GNOME and consistency isn't a strength of Microsoft either (compare Windows XP to Windows Vista to Windows 7, the more you know the more glaring the differences).

Hate to say it but this is pure bunk--almost completely false (I used "almost" to be polite.) Windows is the farthest thing on Earth away from being "very restrictive in the hardware that it will work with."

This entirely depends on how you define the word restrictive in this case. Windows can only be used on x86 hardware. Windows CE supports ARM, but the biggest thing Windows CE has in common with the recent desktop versions is its name, followed by its color scheme.

The point is that hardware OEMs have little incentive to spend time and money developing Linux drivers for their devices simply because the Linux share of the OS market is practically microscopic in comparison with Windows, and smaller even than OS X's market share.

Not retreading over old ground about how Linux marketshare is almost certainly underreported, Linux itself contains support for more hardware than any other OS and has since around half a decade ago.

This includes bits of tech as different as Mr. Coffees and Cray supercomputers. There can be a lag time for the latest and greatest GPU to be supported, however this tends to be in the 3-6 month range, which isn't an issue even for most hardware enthusiasts.

There are a lot of reasons why its market share is so low, and one of them is sort of a self-fulfilling, chicken-and-egg prophecy: hardware drivers

For the vast majority this simply is not true to any degree. The difficulty presented by the desktop market is the abundance of niche, poorly supported or non-supported software packages. This is what keeps Windows on top and it has more to do with inertia than merit.

Following right on the heels of driver development is application support--which is just as critical for Linux to grow.

Hardware drivers are more of a pothole and one that gets filled in more by the day. Application support is the deer in the headlights that threatens to wreck the car.

When computers crash it often has to do with the applications that are running--it doesn't follow at all that "system crashes and downtime" are a way of life for Mac users--if that were true I imagine the Mac PC's market share would be as low as, or lower than, desktop Linux...

I've noted this elsewhere but the greatest asset Apple has is their status as a lifestyle company and the brand recognition that has brought them. There are far better PMPs out there than iPods in any number of areas of measurement, but they don't sell anywhere near as much.

Mac desktops benefit from a similar effect, so it really doesn't follow.

Technically, I suppose, it is "free," but the support that it requires from the software vendors who sell it is anything but free.

I can get the server software for one machine with up to two cpu sockets, and get RH's one-year basic support package for a mere $349, or I could get their one year standard level of support for that one machine for $799, or could go all out for one year and get their premium support for one box for $1,299. Yea, sure, if I opted for RH's premium support on ten, two-socket servers, I could get it for the highway-robbery price of just $12,999 per year--excluding the cost of the server, server applications I'll need to buy, personnel to oversee the servers, etc.

I'd very much like to know what Noyes means exactly by "locked in" with a particular vendor. I mean, if I go the Red Hat server subscription, I'm pretty much "locked in" with them for the duration of the subscription, aren't I?

Seen the licensing terms for Windows Server lately? Not only do you get to pay for the software, you get to pay for support and you get to pay for the number of devices or connections to it. Additionally it has frequently been shown that less physical hardware and fewer skilled admins are required to support a similar type of workload on Linux.

If I don't like Red Hat's terms I can choose to support things on my own with CentOS, or Debian, or OpenSuse, or Ubuntu, or Mepis or whatever else you care to use for that purpose. Some will obviously work better than others for your purposes, but there is very rarely any appreciable incompatibility between them.

That is why Windows has vendor lock-in and Linux doesn't. Linux remains compatible.

OK, so what about the anecdotal evidence of the many governments and organizations still using Microsoft software today? It's tempting to forget them, but not too terribly enlightening.

why, after all these years, and the fact that it is supposed to be "free," and the fact that it is supposed to be open source, is total Linux desktop distribution hovering at a dismal ~1% of the entire market?

How about vendor lock-in? The main thing keeping more governments from switching to Linux isn't the cost of Linux, it's the cost of converting documents made in Word to be readable on Linux.

Governments also aren't known for their switch adoption of the latest and greatest. The FBI supposedly still has some systems from the 70s for chrissakes.

Aside from the fact that it's likely at 6-7 times that amount based both on Microsoft figures and some simple math, the only real reasons of note come down to application support and resistance to change.

People resisted changing over from dumb terminals and Mac OS as well, so it hardly has a lot to do with the systems' actual merit.

 

[devil22]

WaltC's post unfortunately is only notable for its length and wrong-headedness, there is far more in it which is utterly wrong or laughable than there is containing a kernel of truth, which is unfortunate.



It's not especially difficult to understand actually. Using the OS is free, paid commercial support is available as an option after that. If it wasn't available you would be using that to complain about.

Even those which don't make theirs available in binary form without paid support contracts (which means almost no one outside of Red Hat and Novell) you'll find ready equivalents in CentOS and OpenSuse.

You really never need to pay to use Linux unless you choose to. With Windows you do unless you're willing to break the law. Simple.

So lessee, the mac users tell windows users "you get what you pay for" and the linux users tell the windows users "can't beat free".

Ahh, this old crock. I'll direct your attention here: http://www.kde.org/download/distributions.php

That is a list of popular distributions which ship KDE by default and it does not include the literally dozens of others that make it available to install through repositories. No building from source here!

Unless you're a masochist of course, or you know..someone trying to pretend they're impartial while they're anything but.



Which is not being denied, but also does not suddenly make them more secure than Linux (much less FreeBSD), nor does it make them more secure than Mac. Mac's (theoretical) security is worse than Windows because Jobs and Co. are negligent about security, plain and simple.

Bottom line is, all the OSes are pretty much on an equal footing, but linux users continue to trot out the security nonsense like the Windows flagship is Windows 98.

I'll add that Secunia themselves I believe caution against comparing simple advisory numbers and doing so is fraught with difficulties. At the same time I'll note that whatever the reasons (and they are certainly argued back and forth a ton, something I won't engage in here) practically speaking Linux is more secure than Windows.

How so? Does say ubuntu sandbox the browser by default? Does it have a secure desktop to prevent interacting with/reading the credentials prompt? Anything like PatchGuard and require sign drivers? I'd like to know what you base this on.

Another rather simple concept. Microsoft utilizes incompatible formats (mht, activex, doc, vml, jscript, etc.) and refuses to support compatible formats (svg) or supports formats poorly or in an incompatible way (png, odf).

They do this in order to lock people into using their software and make it prohibitively expensive or impossible to switch to a competing vendor. At best you can say that they don't care about interoperability, but their efforts at deliberately breaking compatibility have been documented in the past and they drag their feet on every effort at interoperability.

Software vendors have done this for ages, whether you're talking Microsoft, or AutoDesk, or Adobe, or the older Unix vendors. It's great for whoever corners the market first, but terrible for everyone (and I do mean everyone) else.

This isn't an issue for Linux. It's not a new concept, it's not a difficult concept, and it's not one I think there should be any actual difficulty understanding.

And? How does your argument actually help anything? People are not going to switch to linux because of lock-in, and you can't prevent lock-in. Best you could do is mandate that everyone use open standards, which would cripple the computer industry, because there's just too many applications and instances where the official standards don't provide the functionality that you need. And if everyone followed standards, there would be no html5 browsers, need I remind you that html5 won't be officially ratified until 2022 (not a typo). Yea, that'd be a great benefit if everything in the computer industry was that freakin slow.

Your argument is invalid. There is a tradeoff between security and ease of use it is true, however one shouldn't be writing files willy-nilly to important system directories to begin with and that is the only situation in which moving files will run into problems on any modern OS.

UAC is also unfortunately little more than an advertising bullet point. It was implemented extremely poorly to begin with (even more so in Windows 7) and Microsoft themselves have forsworn it as a security feature when pressed on this point.

What sillyness. UAC prevents just about all malware from getting admin on a windows box, and prevents things from getting out of the internet explorer sandbox. The weakness in UAC is very theoretical, and relies on a user elevated program running code or using settings that are write-able by the standard user, it is a HIGHLY unreliable infection vector. MS does not call it a security boundary because that is a very specific term for them and implies it can never be broken, even if something is practically only breakable in say 1 out of a billion instances, MS can't call it a 'security boundary' but I wouldn't say it is implemented poorly or useless.

Actually agreed for once.



Well you can have one user's files trashed or you can have all users on the system with their files trashed, the root/admin user backdoored and the system serving as a botnet C&C server. I know which I prefer.

The default behavior on Windows remains to not require any sort of password to perform actions with admin-level privileges. As the default behavior that will be how things typically are for 99%+ percent of people out there.

That is unacceptable from a security PoV.

The default is to prompt for authorization to elevate, adding a password prompt would just make everyone disable the password prompt, if they could not disable the password prompt they would stick with XP forever. Windows users are a different animal than linux users, they won't tolerate password prompts.

Needless to say I have considerable doubts about your first statement here.

This entire bit of your post though is notable for how utterly, completely, horrifically wrong it is on IT security. Security through obscurity (at least in this sense) is no security at all. People don't take a glance at code and magically determine what sort of vulnerabilities it has. Far more vulnerabilities are found through fuzzing, in other words through poking at the system and seeing how it reacts.

The only thing attempting to keep code proprietary does, aside from drive up the cost of entry to using the software is prevent the sort of network effects in triangulating and expunging vulnerabilities which are present. Thats because unlike malware authors, most people/companies tend to obey the law which in this case doesn't allow them to patch the software themselves.

Proprietary software is like DRM, it only hurts the good guys.


Which you'll find in GNOME and KDE both. Prior to KDE 4, KDE had changed extremely little GUI-wise for a half decade. The same can be said of GNOME and consistency isn't a strength of Microsoft either (compare Windows XP to Windows Vista to Windows 7, the more you know the more glaring the differences).



This entirely depends on how you define the word restrictive in this case. Windows can only be used on x86 hardware. Windows CE supports ARM, but the biggest thing Windows CE has in common with the recent desktop versions is its name, followed by its color scheme.



Not retreading over old ground about how Linux marketshare is almost certainly underreported, Linux itself contains support for more hardware than any other OS and has since around half a decade ago.

This includes bits of tech as different as Mr. Coffees and Cray supercomputers. There can be a lag time for the latest and greatest GPU to be supported, however this tends to be in the 3-6 month range, which isn't an issue even for most hardware enthusiasts.



For the vast majority this simply is not true to any degree. The difficulty presented by the desktop market is the abundance of niche, poorly supported or non-supported software packages. This is what keeps Windows on top and it has more to do with inertia than merit.



Hardware drivers are more of a pothole and one that gets filled in more by the day. Application support is the deer in the headlights that threatens to wreck the car.



I've noted this elsewhere but the greatest asset Apple has is their status as a lifestyle company and the brand recognition that has brought them. There are far better PMPs out there than iPods in any number of areas of measurement, but they don't sell anywhere near as much.

Mac desktops benefit from a similar effect, so it really doesn't follow.



Seen the licensing terms for Windows Server lately? Not only do you get to pay for the software, you get to pay for support and you get to pay for the number of devices or connections to it. Additionally it has frequently been shown that less physical hardware and fewer skilled admins are required to support a similar type of workload on Linux.

If I don't like Red Hat's terms I can choose to support things on my own with CentOS, or Debian, or OpenSuse, or Ubuntu, or Mepis or whatever else you care to use for that purpose. Some will obviously work better than others for your purposes, but there is very rarely any appreciable incompatibility between them.

That is why Windows has vendor lock-in and Linux doesn't. Linux remains compatible.



How about vendor lock-in? The main thing keeping more governments from switching to Linux isn't the cost of Linux, it's the cost of converting documents made in Word to be readable on Linux.

Governments also aren't known for their switch adoption of the latest and greatest. The FBI supposedly still has some systems from the 70s for chrissakes.

Aside from the fact that it's likely at 6-7 times that amount based both on Microsoft figures and some simple math, the only real reasons of note come down to application support and resistance to change.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_market_share
Of the 8 biggest web statistics firms, they all show linux with 1.7% of less market share. Sorry, but if linux had 6%-10% market share, at least one of these sites would show that, but none of them do. As far as Balmer saying linux market share is higher, well why do linux users come up with a conspiracy theory for everything balmer says and does, EXCEPT that. Let's stick to the usual routine, and say something like "Balmer probably says that to get regulators/doj off his back."

People resisted changing over from dumb terminals and Mac OS as well, so it hardly has a lot to do with the systems' actual merit.

The rest of the stuff you said is not worth my time to address, all I know is I'm happily using Windows 7, daily manifestos from bitter linux users not-withstanding.

 

[TheWeazmeister]

Interesting, so only 9 advisories for OS X, 30 for Windows with almost half coming in one month, and 150 for Debian. Not really sure to make of those numbers but interesting.

Huh?

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0
Affected By 362 Secunia advisories
994 Vulnerabilities

Apple Macintosh OS X
Affected By 146 Secunia advisories
1276 Vulnerabilities

Windows 7
Affected By 34 Secunia advisories
57 Vulnerabilities

 

[TheWeazmeister]

The rest of the stuff you said is not worth my time to address, all I know is I'm happily using Windows 7, daily manifestos from bitter linux users not-withstanding.

+1 Said so devilishly cleverly

 

[phide]

Windows users are a different animal than linux users, they won't tolerate password prompts.

Why? What makes Windows users so "special"?

For what it's worth, I have no issue entering my password in UAC prompts. I did it for a long time before I decided to stop using my User account and instead use the "Administrator" account on a day-to-day basis.

 

[devil22]

Why? What makes Windows users so "special"?

For what it's worth, I have no issue entering my password in UAC prompts. I did it for a long time before I decided to stop using my User account and instead use the "Administrator" account on a day-to-day basis.

Phide...did you miss the whole "OMG I HAVE TO CLIK OK TO UAC I THINK I'M GONNA DIE!!#!@!" episode when Vista launched? And you want these 'people' to enter a PASSWORD?
...
And you yourself switched to an admin account and ask me that? wtf...

 

[phide]

The necessity of entering the admin password for UAC elevations under a user account isn't what prompted me to switch. I'd enter my password as an admin if it were necessary — I don't care. In fact, I would prefer it, since it forces me to spend enough time actively thinking about the UAC prompt, which is essentially the whole idea. I certainly never said anything about "wanting" people to enter the password, either. I'm unsure where you pulled that from.

I don't believe you answered the question, though. What makes Windows users so particularly "special"?

 

[devil22]

I don't understand why you say I didn't answer your question. Windows users are 'special' because they will not tolerate a password prompt, as demostrated by the UAC whine-fest. UAC=click OK or cancel. Password UAC=remember an additional password, select username, enter said password at average of 8 chars., THEN click OK, or click Cancel. Additionally to make the password UAC as secure as the OK/Cancel UAC (AAM) you'd have to enable 'require ctrl-alt-del for elevation' which is three extra buttons. Sorry but the average windows user would have a heart attack.

 

[Pieter3dnow]

Huh?

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0
Affected By 362 Secunia advisories
994 Vulnerabilities

Apple Macintosh OS X
Affected By 146 Secunia advisories
1276 Vulnerabilities

Windows 7
Affected By 34 Secunia advisories
57 Vulnerabilities

Well if you believe this then you will believe anything i guess .