Rob's Software Engineering Logbook

Linux vs. Windows

In my last post, I hinted at a personal preferance that I have towards Linux over Windows. Much to my chagrin, my company has a certain level of Linux acceptance in the Software Department. If it was up to IT, we'd all be on Windows. Thank goodness it isn't up to them, though. They have enough trouble keeping the networks and e-mail servers up.

Linux has to advantage of Open Source that Windows may never have. This is one of the principles of the Simple Accessible Code and it offers the advantage of full disclosure to the end user over what the software is doing.

In my opinion, Linux is also every bit as capable as Windows. There are tools that compare with Microsoft Office (OO) and Adobe Photoshop (Gimp). There is a (pretty much built in) webserver (Apache) and out-of-the-box support for a wide range of programming languages (from Python to Java). Thanks to Mozilla, a superb (and widely accepted) web browser and GUI e-mail client are also available. More and more proprietary software is being released for Linux. Bash terminals are far more powerful than anything that DOS has ever offered.

But the world still uses Windows, and I still own a handful of shares of MSFT in my personal online stock account (mainly because of their latest generation of video game consoles). And in the forseeable future... Windows is here to stay.

Oh well... so much for "accessible code". :(