8 ms·

Depending on the type of user you are, but Linux is miles ahead of Windows for research.

sremani 12y ago
Which way is Linux miles ahead ? This is not a rhetorical question, I really want to understand. What features and functionality of Linux are missing in Windows that sets them miles apart ?
- 4ad 12y ago
  Being Unix-like.
- okasaki 12y ago
  Just off the top of my head: package management, live-cd functionality, architecture support, command-line interfaces, GUI variety, kernel customization, scaling to low-powered harware, licencing.
  - peatmoss 12y ago
    Package management covers this, but is too understated: many of the applications that researchers use are downright hard to get working on Windows--particularly if you require any customization. I've run into this in a maddening way when working with geospatial tools. Need custom OGR/GDAL support? Prepare to spend hours figuring out how to make it work with Windows. Some deal to a lesser extent with R. Amount of time spent on edge cases is Windows > Mac > Linux. I use a Mac, but every time I build up an R environment with lots of library dependencies on Linux, I find myself saying, "well, that was easier than I expected." Conversely, when I use Windows, I'm right back to fighting library dependencies. Windows makes simple things easy, but complex things nearly intractable.
    - bohol 12y ago
      In my experience a lot of this isn't becuase it can't work on windows, but because the developer didn't take the time to make it work on Windows. I also had my fair share on build and dependency problems on Linux when wanting something custom. I think this is much more a ecosystem thing than a systems thing. Which do count of course.
  - wfunction 12y ago
    GUI "variety"? Are you joking? The very reason there exists so much "variety" is that they all suck. Windows has one GUI system and it's worked darn well for quite a long time, and will continue to do so. Linux might be able to let you make your windows do somersaults so you can show off to your friends, but it still hasn't been able to get the basics right, like focus-stealing prevention. Windows is miles ahead of Linux on GUI -- if there's one thing I can tell you for sure, it's that. And Linux is "miles ahead of Windows for research because of its command-line interfaces"? Really? Since when are 25-year-old command-line shells research products? Not to mention stuff like http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls As for package management, when it works it works, but sometimes I wish it could burn in hell. I can't tell you how many times I've run into problems getting packages to work because their dependencies were either (1) no longer available ("sorry! our servers changed, your version of Linux is outdated"), (2) only available in source code form (but good luck compiling it!), or (3) not available for my version ("sorry, this version is too new for your OS"), among other things. Distributing your dependencies along with your application might not be sound engineering practice, but it sure as hell can make things actually work out of the box so you can focus on what you actually want to do.
    - zxcvcxz 12y ago
      >like focus-stealing prevention Example? I could show you thousands of issues on windows where a window has stolen focus and it wasn't prevented[0] [0]: http://www.eightforums.com/ http://www.eightforums.com/
      - wfunction 12y ago
        Could you link me to 2-3 of the actual posts instead of linking me to the entire forum? In the meantime, it seems to me you've already conceded that Linux can't get it right, so I'm glad we agree there.
    - jauer 12y ago
      Also, Windows has package management in the form of Chocolatey/OneGet: http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2014/04/03/windows-management-framework-v5-preview.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2014/04/03/.... It just isn't used by most end-users so awareness is limited.
  - tomc1985 12y ago
    package management: chocolatey, M$ is also developing something live cd functionality: bartPE, UBCD4WIN architecture support: x86, x64, itanium (limited), ARM (limited) command-line interfaces: powershell (sucks but still...), command.com kernel customization: not directly but there are special skus scaling to low powered hardware: Windows Embedded Edition licensing: linux still wins
- acadien 12y ago
  I use linux for research for several reasons. The most important reason is that I own several high performance computing resources that need to run code with as little interference from the OS as possible. Furthermore I need these machines to share a file system and I need to be able to set it up myself with little IT experience. For my purposes Linux is dead simple to use, well documented (most of the time), and does exactly what I need it to do which is to stay the hell out of the way while I burn cycles on real work.
  - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
    This. Basically, Windows for scientific software is as bad as Linux was for 3D FPS gaming fifteen years ago. Just ask anyone who has tried compiling anything scientific under Cygwin. And don't get me started on MS's own compilers. They STILL don't support C99, a sixteen year old standard for one of the most important programming languages!
    - bohol 12y ago
      What do you mean by scientific? There's a lot of Windows only software for research. Mostly for applied things. But also things like data collection. There's even more if you look at development in things like engineering. Even industrial is surisingly much Windows only.
      - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
        Well, yes, I'll give you that "scientific software" is indeed too broad. If I restrict it to "software developed by teams of scientists working at universities and research labs" it's better. And yes, lots of data aquisition stuff is Windows only, particularly the stuff that gets sold along instruments. But then, in that category, the trend seems to be requiring a (preferrably air-gapped) PC running XP. I've even seen stuff running only on Win98 still in use, and I've seen software for rheometers that is STILL distributed on 3.5" floppies. And don't get me started on the "needs-crypto-usb-dongle-to-function" stuff - someone should really tell them that the $300k instrument is a sufficient protection against software piracy.
- Marat_Dukhan 12y ago
  In the kernel: 1. Access to hardware performance counters and energy counters 2. Easily loadable custom drivers 3. File system that is not slow as hell ("Getting the modification time of a file ... seems to be about 100 times slower on Windows than it is on Linux"[1]) 4. Practical mechanism to allocate large pages 5. Futex In the ecosystem: 1. Package manager 2. C99 compiler 3. POSIX environment (a lot of scientific libraries and tools depend on it) [1] http://www.aosabook.org/en/posa/ninja.html http://www.aosabook.org/en/posa/ninja.html
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  SMP is probably one of the reasons Linux is so beloved in research, Windows may have caught up there somewhat, but it wasn't too long ago when you had to pay extra for a version of Windows that would allow you to use a second processor. Windows isn't even an also-ran in supercomputers, which is a shame really. Also being able to have farms of Linux boxes without fussing about with Windows licenses. Networking is another. Windows at least used to have a bunch of different crippleware SKUs with differing networking abilities Filesystems, Linux supports tons of them out of the box.
fsloth 12y ago
"Linux is miles ahead of Windows for research." I think you need to be a bit more specific than that - for research in what field. I can think of several computational areas where either the OS is irrelevant or Windows is a better platform due to ecosystem issues. But yeah, supercomputers, servers, networking, etc, probably.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

Which way is Linux miles ahead ? This is not a rhetorical question, I really want to understand. What features and functionality of Linux are missing in Windows that sets them miles apart ?

4ad 12y ago
Being Unix-like.
okasaki 12y ago
Just off the top of my head: package management, live-cd functionality, architecture support, command-line interfaces, GUI variety, kernel customization, scaling to low-powered harware, licencing.
- peatmoss 12y ago
  Package management covers this, but is too understated: many of the applications that researchers use are downright hard to get working on Windows--particularly if you require any customization. I've run into this in a maddening way when working with geospatial tools. Need custom OGR/GDAL support? Prepare to spend hours figuring out how to make it work with Windows. Some deal to a lesser extent with R. Amount of time spent on edge cases is Windows > Mac > Linux. I use a Mac, but every time I build up an R environment with lots of library dependencies on Linux, I find myself saying, "well, that was easier than I expected." Conversely, when I use Windows, I'm right back to fighting library dependencies. Windows makes simple things easy, but complex things nearly intractable.
  - bohol 12y ago
    In my experience a lot of this isn't becuase it can't work on windows, but because the developer didn't take the time to make it work on Windows. I also had my fair share on build and dependency problems on Linux when wanting something custom. I think this is much more a ecosystem thing than a systems thing. Which do count of course.
- wfunction 12y ago
  GUI "variety"? Are you joking? The very reason there exists so much "variety" is that they all suck. Windows has one GUI system and it's worked darn well for quite a long time, and will continue to do so. Linux might be able to let you make your windows do somersaults so you can show off to your friends, but it still hasn't been able to get the basics right, like focus-stealing prevention. Windows is miles ahead of Linux on GUI -- if there's one thing I can tell you for sure, it's that. And Linux is "miles ahead of Windows for research because of its command-line interfaces"? Really? Since when are 25-year-old command-line shells research products? Not to mention stuff like http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls As for package management, when it works it works, but sometimes I wish it could burn in hell. I can't tell you how many times I've run into problems getting packages to work because their dependencies were either (1) no longer available ("sorry! our servers changed, your version of Linux is outdated"), (2) only available in source code form (but good luck compiling it!), or (3) not available for my version ("sorry, this version is too new for your OS"), among other things. Distributing your dependencies along with your application might not be sound engineering practice, but it sure as hell can make things actually work out of the box so you can focus on what you actually want to do.
  - zxcvcxz 12y ago
    >like focus-stealing prevention Example? I could show you thousands of issues on windows where a window has stolen focus and it wasn't prevented[0] [0]: http://www.eightforums.com/ http://www.eightforums.com/
    - wfunction 12y ago
      Could you link me to 2-3 of the actual posts instead of linking me to the entire forum? In the meantime, it seems to me you've already conceded that Linux can't get it right, so I'm glad we agree there.
  - jauer 12y ago
    Also, Windows has package management in the form of Chocolatey/OneGet: http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2014/04/03/windows-management-framework-v5-preview.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2014/04/03/.... It just isn't used by most end-users so awareness is limited.
- tomc1985 12y ago
  package management: chocolatey, M$ is also developing something live cd functionality: bartPE, UBCD4WIN architecture support: x86, x64, itanium (limited), ARM (limited) command-line interfaces: powershell (sucks but still...), command.com kernel customization: not directly but there are special skus scaling to low powered hardware: Windows Embedded Edition licensing: linux still wins
acadien 12y ago
I use linux for research for several reasons. The most important reason is that I own several high performance computing resources that need to run code with as little interference from the OS as possible. Furthermore I need these machines to share a file system and I need to be able to set it up myself with little IT experience. For my purposes Linux is dead simple to use, well documented (most of the time), and does exactly what I need it to do which is to stay the hell out of the way while I burn cycles on real work.
- semi-extrinsic 12y ago
  This. Basically, Windows for scientific software is as bad as Linux was for 3D FPS gaming fifteen years ago. Just ask anyone who has tried compiling anything scientific under Cygwin. And don't get me started on MS's own compilers. They STILL don't support C99, a sixteen year old standard for one of the most important programming languages!
  - bohol 12y ago
    What do you mean by scientific? There's a lot of Windows only software for research. Mostly for applied things. But also things like data collection. There's even more if you look at development in things like engineering. Even industrial is surisingly much Windows only.
    - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
      Well, yes, I'll give you that "scientific software" is indeed too broad. If I restrict it to "software developed by teams of scientists working at universities and research labs" it's better. And yes, lots of data aquisition stuff is Windows only, particularly the stuff that gets sold along instruments. But then, in that category, the trend seems to be requiring a (preferrably air-gapped) PC running XP. I've even seen stuff running only on Win98 still in use, and I've seen software for rheometers that is STILL distributed on 3.5" floppies. And don't get me started on the "needs-crypto-usb-dongle-to-function" stuff - someone should really tell them that the $300k instrument is a sufficient protection against software piracy.
Marat_Dukhan 12y ago
In the kernel: 1. Access to hardware performance counters and energy counters 2. Easily loadable custom drivers 3. File system that is not slow as hell ("Getting the modification time of a file ... seems to be about 100 times slower on Windows than it is on Linux"[1]) 4. Practical mechanism to allocate large pages 5. Futex In the ecosystem: 1. Package manager 2. C99 compiler 3. POSIX environment (a lot of scientific libraries and tools depend on it) [1] http://www.aosabook.org/en/posa/ninja.html http://www.aosabook.org/en/posa/ninja.html
fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
SMP is probably one of the reasons Linux is so beloved in research, Windows may have caught up there somewhat, but it wasn't too long ago when you had to pay extra for a version of Windows that would allow you to use a second processor. Windows isn't even an also-ran in supercomputers, which is a shame really. Also being able to have farms of Linux boxes without fussing about with Windows licenses. Networking is another. Windows at least used to have a bunch of different crippleware SKUs with differing networking abilities Filesystems, Linux supports tons of them out of the box.

fsloth 12y ago

"Linux is miles ahead of Windows for research." I think you need to be a bit more specific than that - for research in what field. I can think of several computational areas where either the OS is irrelevant or Windows is a better platform due to ecosystem issues. But yeah, supercomputers, servers, networking, etc, probably.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]