7 differences between Linux and Windows

by Richard Bradshaw

Background

Having mainly used various linuxes over the last few years, I’ve returned to using Windows 7 on my main desktop (out of curiosity) and XP on my work laptop (out of the fact it’s not mine!). Thought I’d share somethings I’ve noticed now I’m moving between them daily.

1. Windows doesn’t have a proper command line

The most noticeable thing is that running simple little things isn’t easy on either versions of Windows. There doesn’t appear to be any equivalents of the little things that make things easy for you, no grep, no wget to name just two. This means that you basically have to stop doing certain tasks without spending lots of time working out how to do it. Want to download a huge file? wget -c path_to_large_file doesn’t exist, and in fact there doesn’t seem to be anyway to resume large downloads using the default software setup.

2. Each application looks completely different

Rather than using a standard toolkit, each app looks different. This is sort of nice – things have more personality, but also annoying – there isn’t any convention. Even between Microsoft’s own apps. Guess this is by design, but seems a weird choice. By the same token:

3. There aren’t any native themes

Well, you can change the colours or make it look like the Redmond theme in Gnome but there isn’t much more. The defaults in both 7 and XP are bearable, but it’s nice to have a little more control over things. On the other hand this surely makes developing much easier as you can assume a lot about the users set up.

4. No central updating system

No way to update software at all. Honestly – no dependency system either – each bit of software just includes everything rather than sharing libraries.

5. Suspend/resume just works

A plus here, hardware just works without config. I’ve given up with this on every linux computer I’ve used.

6. No way to save the system when crashes occur

No equivalent of pkill, no way to switch to virtual terminal, no ctrl-alt-backspace to kill the graphical interface. ctrl-shift-esc has something like htop, but it doesn’t have a kill, just a “please end process” button that doesn’t do anything when it’s actually crashed.

7. Files have to have an name extension to work

Rather than deducing the mime type of a file, you have to manually name things with an extension such as .txt or .mp3. Slightly archaic, but guess it works. Annoying if you forget, as you end up with files that won’t load without renaming.

Conclusion

Lots is the same surprisingly – a lot of software is available on Windows and if not it seems there are alternatives available. I’m surprised at how much OSS is available on the platform and for basic tasks there is little to no difference between them.

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