Linux Versus Microsoft

Linux Versus Microsoft

Los Angeles versus New York City, Lowe's versus Home Depot, Chevy versus Ford... it is bound to go on forever because it is the nature of humans. However, there are so many factors to consider with Linux versus Microsoft that while a comparison is fair, a match up is absurd. I read articles in newspapers and magazines referencing open source, free, Linux and proprietary, expensive, Microsoft Windows. This is like rating the content of two books by their titles.

Windows is installed on over ninety percent of the desktop computers in the world. Microsoft and various other companies spend billions of dollars a year designing anti-virus, anti-spyware, and security updates for Windows and its components. Does this make Windows better than Linux? What a ridiculous question. Nearly every security appliance that ships ready to plug in comes with one form of Linux or another. There are less than one hundred known viruses for Linux. So few, in fact, that the only reason to run anti-virus software on Linux, is to filter out viruses for Windows. The dominance of home PCs with Windows is situational irony at its best.

With each new release of Windows the hardware requirements go up. For Windows XP to run decently, it needs 1GB of memory, a 60GB hard drive, a 128MB video card, and a 1.8Ghz processor. To upgrade this system to Windows Vista it would need 2GB of memory, a 100GB hard drive, a 256MB video card, and a 2.0Ghz dual core processor. Newer versions of windows do not run well on old hardware. As Linux advances, the hardware requirements go down. Ubuntu, a Linux distribution, version 6.04 required 512MB of memory, a 40GB hard drive, a 64MB video card, and a 1.6Ghz processor to run comparably with most Windows XP computers. Ubuntu version 8.04, which is the newest version of Ubuntu, requires 256MB of memory, a 30GB hard drive, a 128MB video card, and a 1.4Ghz processor to run at comparable speeds with most Windows Vista computers.

Because Microsoft controls its source code and implies rules and regulations for vendors to follow results in integration unmatched by any other operating system. When I work on any computer with windows on it, I