Muzzy, why does Windows rule?

[Aloone_Jonez]

You might want to start it in another thread, because I am curious what Windows has that Linux does not.

Well the only good thing about Windows is most hadware and software is designed for Windows.

[muzzy]

Oh my. I was afraid of starting this thread myself because no matter how you put it, such a thread on these forums would smell too much of a troll. Anyway, now that the thread is here I might just as well answer.

You say that most hardware and software is designed for windows, and that's indeed a good thing. However, there is a reason to this other than windows merely being so popular. Windows is a good platform. The fact that so much software is made for windows is because so many developers use windows. There are many reasons for developers choosing the platform, but technical issues are among them. The ease of doing things, everything the platform provides, and the mechanisms it offers.

Some of the strong points are Asynchronous I/O design for server apps, DirectX for multimedia abstraction, audio compression manager, COM objects and how they can be used by third parties, heck even the Clipboard. Lately, the .NET is becoming another strong point, but that's more interesting one because it's only loosely tied to windows. Anyone is free to implement the whole system which is standardized and documented. Since windows is providing so many standard apis, application development is straightforward and sane.

Windows also has a strong UI system, and mechanisms to seamlessly integrate and interoperate with it. Clipboard, Drag&Drop, Common Controls, the whole window class mechanism for widget management, etc. On *nix platforms, the X11 natively only supports bitmaps and primitives, no widgets whatsoever. As a result, all applications use whatever libraries they want to, and results tend to look different based on what libraries were used.

Since the *nix systems doesn't provide common apis for many important highlevel operations, they tend to end up with multiple different libraries implementing the same things, in different ways, at different levels of conformance to standards. For example, see all the XML libraries out there. For windows, there's MSXML and anyone's free to use it. Ofcourse, nobody's forced to use it, but if someone got the idea of selling an xml library I'm sure we'd have another fight about integration and competition killing practices.

Having all the apis available is what makes the platform nice for developers. See PHP for an example. PHP was already damned popular even before anyone had bothered to write any kind of language specification. All development was rather empirical, with "let's see if this works now" attitude. Yet, developers loved it, because things were so easy and straightforward. With all the libraries bound to the language, everyone could use all those things without hassle. Having to install libraries and especially having to deal with redistributing libraries to users of the software is quite quite troublesome. PHP is widely trusted because when the server supports PHP, you know your applications should work there unless they depend on something unusual. Same applies for windows. When you have a windows system, you know your applications are going to work. With a linux as an application platform, you only have the kernel and whatever libraries the language guarantees to exist. Anything else and the users have to install something new, which is a hassle.

Phew, that was a long post and only addressed some specific things. There are multitude of reasons why windows is such a great OS, and a lot of them have to do with specific tasks at hand. For a generic view, it's tough to point out things because there are always exception cases where another system is better, and people tend to think that finding such exceptions invalidate everything the generic points stand for.

Feel free to ask more specific questions for more specific answers.

[Aloone_Jonez]

How about OLE?

Apart from applications suit like OpenOffice I've not  seen any evedance of any standard Linux OLE API or it's use in Linux programs.

Do you perfer FreeBSD to Windows NT / Linux as a server OS?

[muzzy]

About server OS, I don't really have a preferences. NetBSD, Debian GNU/Linux and Solaris are all fine choices, depending on what I want to do with the server exactly. If it has to be a shell box, I'd probably go for Debian since the GNU userland is pretty much "standard" nowadays, people know how to use GNU tools.

About OLE, that's good too, as part of COM technology overall. Gnome is slowly beginning to gain similar functionality afaik, depending on CORBA for the actual work or so I've heard. The in-place editors and viewers that OLE can give you are indeed quite interesting stuff in the win32 land. Since the system has standardized menu system etc for applications, all OLE objects can interact with them too, to merge the activated object menus into the host application. It's a quite powerful UI concept indeed. Since COM is a binary standard, it's language neutral and you can implement the container objects in any language that can implement the COM binary interface.

COM is just a technology, and different applications define interfaces you can implement with COM. Then, these objects can be registered into the system to be used by any application. COM object types include DirectX image/audio filters, Widgets such as buttons and gauges, Application extensions such as toolbars and plugins, Embeddable objects (OLE) such as bitmaps and midi sequences and video clips, Utility objects such as winsock object and XML parser, and application objects to enable scripting of applications. Blah blah blah. No, I didn't copypaste that from anywhere, but I did "cheat" a little and used OLE/COM Object Viewer (ships with visual studio) to refresh my memory

[Calum]

You say that most hardware and software is designed for windows, and that's indeed a good thing.

jeeesus fuck!


no.

you know what? i am not even going to go further than this. i'm not even going to read this thread, let alone respond.

any thread that starts with a line like this, really doesn't need or want my input, sadly.


"good thing" !

[Kintaro]

Personally, I don't care anymore what people run. I run Linux because it has the technology that suits me. If you want all the things Muzzy mentioned: a very complex system. Then go right ahead and run Windows. It will also have very complex problems if you don't have a large base of knowledge regarding it like our Muzzy here. That is the problem with complexity on large scales, it can bring in all kinds of stupid people who are not complex at all loving it. It is my personal philosophy that Less is More and thats one of the things I like about Linux. It certainly has its shortfalls, I bitch about them all the time. I don't like how the desktop has QT, GTK, GTK2, etc, etc, and a lot of programs use different libarys that do almost the same job. However I am willing to accept that loss because I have got a pretty firm base of mainly GTK based applications I use on my Gnome Desktop, and a clever KDE user will have the Qt based applications mostly that they use. Thats the other thing I dig about Linux, that people have a little more choise in there system because there are two major desktops that do work together a little. It also allows customisation, a great deal of it. However Windows can do all these as well, it just depends which one you prefer using and whats important to the user.

People have different types of personalitys that define completely different types of thinking and use of resources, and thats what a computer really is, a great resource. With all this in my head, when I really think about it there is no such thing as a superior system. There are just different people and different systems. There are a lot of things I like about Linux I wish Windows had, there are a lot of things about Windows I wish Linux had. However I weigh them out and I get a strong tendancy towards Linux. Muzzy weighs them out and prefers Windows, why is this? Bingo! People are different.

[muzzy]

Oops about that "and that's indeed a good thing" sentence. When I was writing it, I was being interrupted several times. I definitely didn't mean to write it that way. A better wording would be "and that's indeed good thing for windows users" or something along those words. What I meant was that it's a definite advantage for Windows as a platform to have the developers aiming for it. Thus, it's a good thing for windows, as a platform, that software and hardware is targeted for it.

I definitely didn't mean that it's a good thing that software and hardware gets locked to a single platform. That's not good. Exclusiveness sucks even when there are reasons for it. I didn't mean it's a good thing that the software and hardware doesn't get available to other systems.

Clear?

[Kintaro]

Yea, I figured that comment was a little rushed, also in its typographical properties, so I just didn't comment.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I agree I did think it was a bit silly but kintaro & I thought the same as kintaro - I suppose great minds think alike.

[muzzy]

Well, not being native english speaker it's easier for me to screw up my sentences so that even I won't understand them the way I meant them if I read them again after a few minutes.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Well muzzy your English seems pretty good to me, and I think Calum was a bit over critical of your communication skills.

[Kintaro]

All non english speakers that know english as a second langauge have better english then most morons, that speak it primarily.

[muzzy]

No, I can completely see how he would misunderstand that "it's a good thing" sentence. It's really badly formed, and I should've proofread the message before sending it. Well, I never proofread any of my messages, but had I done so I would've noticed it. heh.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I know what you mean kintaro, I'm dyslexic so I can't spell very well. I often spelcheck posts in OpenOffice and lookup the odd word with google and there's Calum over there who can't be bothered with capital letters.

[Calum]

you can all go and fuck yourselves.

and if you think that's overcritical then...

well, you can still go and fuck yourself. :-D

Nothing personal, but if people can't be arsed saying what they mean, then they can't expect me to intuit what they are talking about.

for the record, muzzy explains himself quite clearly in his reply, which is great, but certain other people criticising my misunderstanding of a (clearly, when looking back upon it) misleading statement are perhaps a little overzealous in their judgements too.

now, unless somebody else wants to criticise me, i'm done in this discussion.