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> Windows as an OS is not as resilient as Linux when it comes to non-ideal operating conditions. I'd disagree with this statement on the grounds that Windows h

> Windows as an OS is not as resilient as Linux when it comes to non-ideal operating conditions. I'd disagree with this statement on the grounds that Windows has to run across the most heterogenous set of hardware and configurations of any of the major OSes. That it doesn't fail more often is a testament to its resiliency. It supports the $200 junkbox your gran bought from Walmart to $20,000 enterprise racks and is expected to support all of those different workloads and insane variety of software that can be installed. In contrast, I'd make the case that the majority of Linux distros are running in large data centers like AWS, Azure, and GCP where there's a relatively high degree of homogeneity of the underlying hardware and the operating environment on top of that. macOS, for example, operates a comparatively limited set of hardware platforms.

ffsm8 2y ago
For the record, Linux generally supports way more hardware. Things that have been deprecated for windows XP still work fine today on modern Linux. And it runs on super underpowered boards too, on which windows doesn't even have any chance of booting
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  Does it though? For all of the use cases that a user might expect including device drivers like graphics cards, audio drivers, BT and wifi device drivers, print drivers, etc.? I'm sure a Linux distro could, but somewhere someone would have had to write a driver for it. The Windows ecosystem supports a ridiculous variety of hardware.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    > Does it though? Yes it does. RedHat deprecates older drivers, but it's their problem. I connect too many stupid things to my Debian box, and they're enumerated and initialized instantly. These drivers get bug fixes too.
  - jenscow 2y ago
    The Windows ecosystem supports those devices (which are irrelevant to servers anyway). ie, it's the manufacturers that support Windows, rather than the OS supporting them.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    That is a myth that I have also believed until I had to install Windows Enterprise IoT on various kinds of embedded computers. The Windows that comes preinstalled with most computers truly "supports a ridiculous variety of hardware", but that happens because some professional has already spent some time with the installation of Windows together with all the device drivers provided by the vendors of the various weirder components included in that computer. When I had to install Windows on embedded computers I had countless problems. I had to use frequently some complicated methods to give device drivers to the Windows installer at an early phase, because it was not able to boot on those computers. Their BIOS/UEFI lacked many legacy features, while Windows lacked drivers for some modern features, so they were mismatched. Even after Windows was eventually installed, some of those computers had SSDs with low writing speeds, which made them unbelievably slow in Windows due to some stupid and useless Windows services, which by default were writing continuously the SSD and it was very difficult to disable them. Fortunately, that was Windows Enterprise, so it was possible to disable Windows Updates. On some of the computers with problematic SSDs, after the initial installation, booting required more than an hour, because that much was required every day to perform Windows Updates. Only disabling both Windows Updates and various indexing and swapping services has lowered the booting time to normal values. On the other hand, Linux booted immediately on any of those computers, without having to do anything, and in comparison with Windows it was blindingly fast. Obviously, because those computers were intended to be used as embedded computers they did not have any of the peculiar peripheral devices that are usually included in laptops and for which their vendors provide neither documentation nor Linux device drivers, so they are unusable in Linux unless successfully reverse-engineered, while working fine in the preinstalled Windows.
- Salgat 2y ago
  I think the real miracle here is the amount of support a single company provides for Windows, while Linux support is very fractured (in a good way) among many companies with varying levels of support.
akho 2y ago
With container workloads, "Linux" is just the kernel; userland can be largely absent. That kernel runs on cheapest phones, and on largest supercomputers. With a similarly wide diversity of software. A much more heterogeneous environment than Windows can dream of.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  > With container workloads, "Linux" is just the kernel; userland can be largely absent. That's my point: It supports the $200 junkbox your gran bought from Walmart to $20,000 enterprise racks and is expected to support all of those different workloads
  - akho 2y ago
    I do not understand your point. You are claiming that Windows needs to support a greater variety of hardware than linux, which is not true. Windows does not run on phones or supercomputers; linux runs everywhere windows does.
    - CharlieDigital 2y ago
      Those phones are made by a small number of hardware vendors on homogeneous hardware. At any given time, Google only has a handful of Pixels that it is supporting, those Pixels do not have user configurable hardware, and those Pixels are all identical. Dell sells a PC and it has to work with any number of possible storage devices. Users might swap out the modem. It is expected to work with any PCI-E device. It supports hundreds of classes and models of devices like printers and scanners. etc. etc. Saying that "it is used on phones" doesn't really mean much when there are only what? 5? 6? major phone manufacturers supporting a limited and largely homogeneous set hardware configurations. Same for cars; a small pool of manufacturers and suppliers on identical hardware configurations.
      - skeledrew 2y ago
        You'd be surprised at just how heterogenous Android devices are. Each OEM does their own thing, and it's only in the past few years that Google has gotten a few things standardized. Of course there's still a lot that hasn't been, and will never be standardized. And the core of Android is Linux. Not to mention there's Termux[0] which works on almost any device, from the fairly old to the very modern (currently running it on my OnePlus 12, and also had it on past devices). [0] https://termux.dev/en/ https://termux.dev/en/
commercialnix 2y ago
[flagged]
- bigallen 2y ago
  Yikes. Chill out
  - commercialnix 2y ago
    No.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  And guess what? Those smartphones, cars, etc. are all made by a relatively small number of suppliers on....homogeneous hardware. Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, Sony, OnePlus (any other majors?) are pumping out devices running the same stack and writing their own drivers. Can you plug a non-Samsung internal storage device into a Samsung phone? Can you attach a screen from a Samsung device to a Motorola phone? Will a Xiaomi modem work in a Sony phone? Buy a consumer Walmart PC running Windows and it is expected to be plug and play with nearly any graphics card, USB scanner, printer, etc. I don't think Microsoft gets enough credit for supporting such a huge and varied consumer user base. For sure, Linux is the core of every Android device and every modern car. But those hardware stacks are homogeneous by manufacturer and there's only a handful of major manufacturers; those devices are carbon copies from a hardware perspective and a manufacturer only has a handful that they support at any given time.
  - commercialnix 2y ago
    > Those smartphones, cars, etc. are all made by a relatively small number of suppliers on And Windows doesn't run at all on 99.99999% of them, and never will. > Buy a consumer Walmart PC running Windows and it is expected to be plug and play with nearly any graphics card, USB scanner, printer, etc There isn't a single graphics card you can buy in a store today that doesn't work with Linux. In the mid-2000s there were USB scanners and printers that didn't work with Linux but now finding a USB scanner or printer that doesn't work with Linux is extremely rare. This argument about compatibility is an extremely stupid argument.
bayindirh 2y ago
> Windows has to run across the most heterogenous set of hardware and configurations of any of the major OSes. Fair, but let's not forget a couple of facts. First of all, most of the early Linux woes stemmed from two main roots. Drivers, and bad implementations of standards (ACPI & APIC most prominently). Lower cost Windows machines always needed "vendor drivers" to workaround what sins vendors committed with bottom of the barrel hardware, so these drivers handled the non-standard things they did with the already crippled hardware. Let's also not forget that Microsoft tried their best to weaponize standards to break Linux (in a similar fashion they broke Dr. DOS). See: Halloween Documents [0]. So given your hardware implements the standards correctly, and you have drivers for your hardware, Linux works way better on the same hardware than Windows. This brings us to > It supports the $200 junkbox your gran bought from Walmart to $20,000 enterprise racks and is expected to support all of those different workloads and insane variety of software that can be installed. I have two Intel N100 boxes. One is running W11, the other one is running Debian Testing w/KDE. Former is my parents', latter is mine. Mine is using less RAM, running way cooler, and uses less CPU cycles to accomplish harder tasks, while supporting all the hardware on it, at full speed. So, given your hardware implements the standards, and you have drivers, there's no difference in support. It's not a design/kernel issue. It's a support/willingness issue. I just remembered that Valve's Source Engine ran 25% faster on Linux after porting without any post-port optimizations, which is a great example how Linux is generally lighter and how well it can perform if given proper drivers for any piece of hardware. > In contrast, I'd make the case that the majority of Linux distros are running in large data centers like AWS, Azure, and GCP where there's a relatively high degree of homogeneity of the underlying hardware and the operating environment on top of that. I'm an HPC admin managing clusters close to two decades. The problems you encounter on these systems when something goes wrong is way complex than you see on desktop systems. All of these resiliency features create tons of complexity while helping you. Linux runs on these systems better for a longer time, because these systems are implementing standards correctly for a longer time, and you pay for expensive hardware and correct implementation of it, so kernel bundled drivers work correctly 99.9% of the time when you change the hardware. > macOS, for example, operates a comparatively limited set of hardware platforms. XNU is for all intents and purposes is BSD kernel, and macOS can be considered a BSD. Give proper drivers, macOS can also run on from your spoon to a satellite. It's POSIX compliant. They even contribute back to BSDs. [0]: https://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/ https://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/
skeledrew 2y ago
I wouldn't consider something that needs to go into a special, unusable mode to apply updates and restarted after to be that resilient. I usually apply many an update to my laptop (running Kubuntu) while using it, and even ignore the occasional restart message (after a kernel update), as it's just a recommendation that can be deferred indefinitely, and my system still remains stable. And my uptimes tend to be on the order of months. Now that's resilience IMO.

ffsm8 2y ago

For the record, Linux generally supports way more hardware. Things that have been deprecated for windows XP still work fine today on modern Linux. And it runs on super underpowered boards too, on which windows doesn't even have any chance of booting

CharlieDigital 2y ago
Does it though? For all of the use cases that a user might expect including device drivers like graphics cards, audio drivers, BT and wifi device drivers, print drivers, etc.? I'm sure a Linux distro could, but somewhere someone would have had to write a driver for it. The Windows ecosystem supports a ridiculous variety of hardware.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  > Does it though? Yes it does. RedHat deprecates older drivers, but it's their problem. I connect too many stupid things to my Debian box, and they're enumerated and initialized instantly. These drivers get bug fixes too.
- jenscow 2y ago
  The Windows ecosystem supports those devices (which are irrelevant to servers anyway). ie, it's the manufacturers that support Windows, rather than the OS supporting them.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  That is a myth that I have also believed until I had to install Windows Enterprise IoT on various kinds of embedded computers. The Windows that comes preinstalled with most computers truly "supports a ridiculous variety of hardware", but that happens because some professional has already spent some time with the installation of Windows together with all the device drivers provided by the vendors of the various weirder components included in that computer. When I had to install Windows on embedded computers I had countless problems. I had to use frequently some complicated methods to give device drivers to the Windows installer at an early phase, because it was not able to boot on those computers. Their BIOS/UEFI lacked many legacy features, while Windows lacked drivers for some modern features, so they were mismatched. Even after Windows was eventually installed, some of those computers had SSDs with low writing speeds, which made them unbelievably slow in Windows due to some stupid and useless Windows services, which by default were writing continuously the SSD and it was very difficult to disable them. Fortunately, that was Windows Enterprise, so it was possible to disable Windows Updates. On some of the computers with problematic SSDs, after the initial installation, booting required more than an hour, because that much was required every day to perform Windows Updates. Only disabling both Windows Updates and various indexing and swapping services has lowered the booting time to normal values. On the other hand, Linux booted immediately on any of those computers, without having to do anything, and in comparison with Windows it was blindingly fast. Obviously, because those computers were intended to be used as embedded computers they did not have any of the peculiar peripheral devices that are usually included in laptops and for which their vendors provide neither documentation nor Linux device drivers, so they are unusable in Linux unless successfully reverse-engineered, while working fine in the preinstalled Windows.
Salgat 2y ago
I think the real miracle here is the amount of support a single company provides for Windows, while Linux support is very fractured (in a good way) among many companies with varying levels of support.

akho 2y ago

With container workloads, "Linux" is just the kernel; userland can be largely absent. That kernel runs on cheapest phones, and on largest supercomputers. With a similarly wide diversity of software. A much more heterogeneous environment than Windows can dream of.

CharlieDigital 2y ago
> With container workloads, "Linux" is just the kernel; userland can be largely absent. That's my point: It supports the $200 junkbox your gran bought from Walmart to $20,000 enterprise racks and is expected to support all of those different workloads
- akho 2y ago
  I do not understand your point. You are claiming that Windows needs to support a greater variety of hardware than linux, which is not true. Windows does not run on phones or supercomputers; linux runs everywhere windows does.
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    Those phones are made by a small number of hardware vendors on homogeneous hardware. At any given time, Google only has a handful of Pixels that it is supporting, those Pixels do not have user configurable hardware, and those Pixels are all identical. Dell sells a PC and it has to work with any number of possible storage devices. Users might swap out the modem. It is expected to work with any PCI-E device. It supports hundreds of classes and models of devices like printers and scanners. etc. etc. Saying that "it is used on phones" doesn't really mean much when there are only what? 5? 6? major phone manufacturers supporting a limited and largely homogeneous set hardware configurations. Same for cars; a small pool of manufacturers and suppliers on identical hardware configurations.
    - skeledrew 2y ago
      You'd be surprised at just how heterogenous Android devices are. Each OEM does their own thing, and it's only in the past few years that Google has gotten a few things standardized. Of course there's still a lot that hasn't been, and will never be standardized. And the core of Android is Linux. Not to mention there's Termux[0] which works on almost any device, from the fairly old to the very modern (currently running it on my OnePlus 12, and also had it on past devices). [0] https://termux.dev/en/ https://termux.dev/en/

commercialnix 2y ago

[flagged]

bigallen 2y ago
Yikes. Chill out
- commercialnix 2y ago
  No.
CharlieDigital 2y ago
And guess what? Those smartphones, cars, etc. are all made by a relatively small number of suppliers on....homogeneous hardware. Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, Sony, OnePlus (any other majors?) are pumping out devices running the same stack and writing their own drivers. Can you plug a non-Samsung internal storage device into a Samsung phone? Can you attach a screen from a Samsung device to a Motorola phone? Will a Xiaomi modem work in a Sony phone? Buy a consumer Walmart PC running Windows and it is expected to be plug and play with nearly any graphics card, USB scanner, printer, etc. I don't think Microsoft gets enough credit for supporting such a huge and varied consumer user base. For sure, Linux is the core of every Android device and every modern car. But those hardware stacks are homogeneous by manufacturer and there's only a handful of major manufacturers; those devices are carbon copies from a hardware perspective and a manufacturer only has a handful that they support at any given time.
- commercialnix 2y ago
  > Those smartphones, cars, etc. are all made by a relatively small number of suppliers on And Windows doesn't run at all on 99.99999% of them, and never will. > Buy a consumer Walmart PC running Windows and it is expected to be plug and play with nearly any graphics card, USB scanner, printer, etc There isn't a single graphics card you can buy in a store today that doesn't work with Linux. In the mid-2000s there were USB scanners and printers that didn't work with Linux but now finding a USB scanner or printer that doesn't work with Linux is extremely rare. This argument about compatibility is an extremely stupid argument.

bayindirh 2y ago

> Windows has to run across the most heterogenous set of hardware and configurations of any of the major OSes. Fair, but let's not forget a couple of facts. First of all, most of the early Linux woes stemmed from two main roots. Drivers, and bad implementations of standards (ACPI & APIC most prominently). Lower cost Windows machines always needed "vendor drivers" to workaround what sins vendors committed with bottom of the barrel hardware, so these drivers handled the non-standard things they did with the already crippled hardware. Let's also not forget that Microsoft tried their best to weaponize standards to break Linux (in a similar fashion they broke Dr. DOS). See: Halloween Documents [0]. So given your hardware implements the standards correctly, and you have drivers for your hardware, Linux works way better on the same hardware than Windows. This brings us to > It supports the $200 junkbox your gran bought from Walmart to $20,000 enterprise racks and is expected to support all of those different workloads and insane variety of software that can be installed. I have two Intel N100 boxes. One is running W11, the other one is running Debian Testing w/KDE. Former is my parents', latter is mine. Mine is using less RAM, running way cooler, and uses less CPU cycles to accomplish harder tasks, while supporting all the hardware on it, at full speed. So, given your hardware implements the standards, and you have drivers, there's no difference in support. It's not a design/kernel issue. It's a support/willingness issue. I just remembered that Valve's Source Engine ran 25% faster on Linux after porting without any post-port optimizations, which is a great example how Linux is generally lighter and how well it can perform if given proper drivers for any piece of hardware. > In contrast, I'd make the case that the majority of Linux distros are running in large data centers like AWS, Azure, and GCP where there's a relatively high degree of homogeneity of the underlying hardware and the operating environment on top of that. I'm an HPC admin managing clusters close to two decades. The problems you encounter on these systems when something goes wrong is way complex than you see on desktop systems. All of these resiliency features create tons of complexity while helping you. Linux runs on these systems better for a longer time, because these systems are implementing standards correctly for a longer time, and you pay for expensive hardware and correct implementation of it, so kernel bundled drivers work correctly 99.9% of the time when you change the hardware. > macOS, for example, operates a comparatively limited set of hardware platforms. XNU is for all intents and purposes is BSD kernel, and macOS can be considered a BSD. Give proper drivers, macOS can also run on from your spoon to a satellite. It's POSIX compliant. They even contribute back to BSDs. [0]: https://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/ https://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/

skeledrew 2y ago

I wouldn't consider something that needs to go into a special, unusable mode to apply updates and restarted after to be that resilient. I usually apply many an update to my laptop (running Kubuntu) while using it, and even ignore the occasional restart message (after a kernel update), as it's just a recommendation that can be deferred indefinitely, and my system still remains stable. And my uptimes tend to be on the order of months. Now that's resilience IMO.