Advantages of Linux over Windows

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I'm compiling a list of reasons why Linux is still better than Windows. This I think may help convert more people and promote the growth of Linux and free software. I have a few right now, and I was wondering what other people have to add. They need to compare to all versions of Windows, including Windows 7, so speed is not really a valid reason. Here is what I have right now:

- Linux is free as in freedom. You can do anything you want with it.

- It's free as in beer, meaning you don't pay for it.

- It's more customizable than Windows, with different themes, the choice of multiple desktop environments, and many options to control its behavior.

- Many programs come already installed, so you don't have to go searching for them on the internet.

- There is a user-friendly package management system for installing additional applications easily.

- It works on many different architectures, including x86-64, AMD64, PowerPC, ARM, SPARC, Alpha, HPPA, MIPS, and even some legacy architectures.

- It's highly portable; you can use the same Linux distro for desktops, servers, netbooks, mobile phones and supercomputers.

- There are many versions to choose from.

- There are more scripting languages natively supported, such as Perl, Ruby, Python, bash, Tcl/Tk, sed, and awk.

- It runs KDE and GNOME applications without issue and without requiring additional software.

- It is rarely a target of viruses or malware due to its low profile on the desktop computer market.

- Linux filesystems like Ext3, Ext4, and XFS are more resistant to fragmentation. Windows's NTFS filesystem fragments very easily.

- Linux is also more flexible when it comes to partitioning as you can store it on either a primary partition or a logical partition. Windows must use a primary partition, and often it takes up more than one.

Are there any more?

If I can extend on the freedom part. GNU/Linux and all Free Software give you the rights to use your computer (pc, console (linux on the PS3), phone with android or meego on the N900) in any way you see fit. A lot of software tends to have restrictions on it, you need to upgrade for certain features, the product may be dropped after a few years and you have to get the next version (Windows XP).


With Free Software you have the freedom to control your device rather than the software company controlling your device which is becoming more and more common these days, for example the PS3 had features dropped from its system with there latest update, and there wasn't much of an option not to update.

If you play games, its worth looking up winehq and check if your games run on wine, in a lot of cases most games run quiet well sometimes even better on wine than on windows.

And if your paranoid the government is watching you you can audit the source code

One thing I must say, Free Software is free (as in free beer) as a side effect of it being open to anyone to use, but if you use it and you benefit from it you should give back to it. That may be promotion of the software or Free Software in general, bug reports, documentation, donate a little money, or even just saying thanks in an email to the developers of your favourite program, most are doing it in there spare time after all.

Neither of these are true. I have installed Windows in the extended partition multiple times before, you just need to partition seperate from the OS install, and for fragmentation NTFS is not more prone to performance degredation due to fragmentation, actually it's less prone to it (it fragments more, but looses less performance due to it).

And it should be the advantages of GNU/Linux over Windows NT, not the advantages of Linux (just a kernel) over Windows (a product line that's been dead since 2001 and never used NTFS).

Finally, you forgot the biggest advantage of GNU/Linux over Windows NT: it can be installed without a GUI on hardware that's so old it could never run Windows in an appliance, or administered over a VT100 emulator through an RS232 port.

This I know is false. The Windows partition showed up as NTFS in my partition manager. I have a screenshot to prove it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/49514510@N04/4925750304/

Another thing you should notice in this screenshot is that there are two NTFS partitions, one is the C: drive and the other is labeled System. Both are primary partitions, and there were two other partitions, an NTFS for recovery and a FAT32 for HP tools. I deleted the last two, as you can see, but when I had them, Windows was using all four primary partitions. I also found I couldn't resize sda2, even though most of it was unused. This is probably due to fragmentation.

Here's one forum thread on the Microsoft website concerning Windows 7's use of NTFS:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 77f8006fd7

Here is an article concerning NTFS fragmentation:

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_optimization.htm

Windows XP and Windows 7 are both Windows NT systems and use the Windows NT microkernel, versions 5.1 and 6.1, respectively. Plain Windows systems include Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE and ME, and ended there, and are a shell on top of DOS.

Here are some other screenshots:

In this one you can see that the buttons for resizing the NTFS partition are grey, meaning I could not shrink it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/49514510@N04/4925206781/

In this one, you can see that the filesystem is indeed Windows and that it barfed when I unmounted it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/49514510@N04/4925206833/

Did you even read my post? Windows NT uses the NT file system (NTFS) and includes Windows NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 2003, 2008, Vista, 7 and 2008 R2, among others.

Classic Windows has been dead since 2001.

The point remains that NTFS is not more resistant to fragmentation than Ext3, XFS, etc. I can link to sites that say so, such as:

From http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=755 :

I think that the above reasons don't really make it better than Windows, as Windows comes with a lot of software usually, especially since most people get it pre-installed on their by an OEM, and also its much easier to install a larger variety of Windows programs as only the programs that have packages available are easier to install in Linux, its much easier to run a Windows installer than to install software that has not been packaged, and not much more difficult than installing packaged software. Also I don't think being able to run KDE and GNOME applications is an advantage at all, with Windows you can just run any Windows application (that's not too old) whereas running KDE and GNOME applications requires that you use KDE or GNOME, which most, but not all desktop distros come with. And just the fact that there is both KDE and GNOME serves to confuse many beginning users.

Variety and choice in Linux distros is nice, but isn't going to get many people to switch. I know people who are intimidated by the choices avalible, whereas with Windows they just get whatever the most recent desktop version is. I myself, while not intimidated, spent over a month trying to pick a distro, and then just ended up trying live cds for a few months before actually getting to the point where I was ready to install Linux (ended up with Ubuntu, and have Fedora in a VM).

But that said, I do like Linux a lot, I just don't see average users as being willing to switch even if you come up with some very good reasons, and have failed many times to even get people to try Linux.

And one more reason to add to your list:
Linux is a lot more fun to mess around with than Windows, and has proven much harder to kill (I completely killed the Win7 Beta and RC, and now am fairly cautious with my Win7 install, whereas I been pretty hard on Ubuntu)

I can quote many more. My point was that even when moderately fragmented, NTFS is higher performance than all of the above, thanks to the $MFT and inclusion of files under 1 kB into it, and the lack of usage of inodes, allows it to be more effecient. The basic structure of ext, ext2, ext3, ext4, ZFS and so on are all based on UFS, a theoretical filesystem designed for pre-Winchester disks. NTFS was designed from the ground up for Winchester disks, and ExFAT (supported on Windows Vista SP1 and Windows 7, among others) is designed for high performance on flash media.

Windows doesn't really come with much pre-installed software. notepad, wordpad, mspaint and IE are about it and only good for there purpose, basic editing and browsing.

while I agree that with GNU/Linux it can be difficult on occasion to find a specific non-mainstream package most of the larger distros dont have this problem and when the problem does arise it tends to be specialised programs that are badly packaged in the first place.

For your average user someone who may browse the web, email, write up some documents there is really no significant advantage to using windows and in the long run a greater financial and security (weight off your mind) benefit to using GNU/Linux, it provides far better tools for day to day tasks which windows can not provide unless you hand out the money.

Your basic windows install will have the basic programs i mentioned, it may have tiral software for more advanced things, usually there's a 60 day trial of MS office but thats about it.

Installing software on windows I also find a pain, each peice of software needs to be downloaded (or loaded from a cd) and installed with an installer thats different on each install, and on ocasions the installation wants to change my browser home page or install yahoo toolbar




I have found that giving people a reason to switch to GNU/Linux is not enough, people are to lazy to do the job, most of the time when ive talked about GNU/Linux no one can argue that they shouldnt use it they just cant be bothered, which is a shame.

The best method to correct this I have found is to 'borrow' there computer or laptop and install a Distro for them, ive done this on 2 ocasions and after a month deleted there windows partition

A few pointers is all thats needed, i used Ubuntu(on there computers not mine) i found for your average user its pretty good, showed them around Applications == Start and where the power button is located and there good to go, ive never had them asking questions about how to do something. They have even got used to the idea of the login screen and passwords


On the filesystem thing. Since you cant use any other filesystem on windows and no one would use NTFS on linux anyway maybe the argument should be, you can choose your filesystem...

NTFS isnt bad, its a lot better than FAT32 but the reason we have ext2,3,4 zfs, btrfs(awesome), xfs, nfs, reiserfs is because they all allow us to do different things and solve problems other filesystems have, an option windows doesnt allow. Its basically NTFS or nothing.

High performance is an ambiguous term, but Windows XP uses the NTFS filesystem and runs very slowly. The claim that it's more efficient than any Unix filesystem is bull$hit. When I open files in Mac or Linux, they open instantaneously. On Mac, I can scan the entire visible filesystem with Spotlight and it comes up with results instantly, as opposed to Windows, which takes longer to search. I can load hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of binary files in a document viewer in a matter of seconds. Archiving/unarchiving and compression/decompression are instantaneous.

And how do inodes impair a filesystem's performance? I searched "inode efficiency" on Google and I came up with a bunch of web pages that said that they actually increase efficiency. I also did some searches on MFT using the Google suggest box and found a whole bunch of stuff on defragmenting, and how the MFT is extremely hard, if not impossible, to defragment.

As for the effect of fragmentation on performance, it affects a system in more ways than just speed. It can lead to other problems, such as inflexibility in manipulating partitions. I already linked to the screenshot that showed that the NTFS partition could not be resized, probably due to fragmentation. I also had problems booting into Windows 7, where it would display an error message upon boot saying it was not shut down properly and it needed to check the hard disk for corruption (Yes, I did shut it down properly, unless going to "Shut down" from the start menu isn't the proper way.). Whether this had anything to do with fragmenting I don't know.

NTFS vs Ext4

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... &px=ODIxNw

There about the same.

And if you want to compare features http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

Speed is not necessarily the thing you should be looking at, speed is far more likely to depend on hardware than the filesystem its self (with some exceptions on occasion) you should be looking at features.

On features NTFS wins against Ext4, but you still wouldnt use it on GNU/Linux

We all know btrfs is the future anyway (and on comparison to NTFS, btrfs wins! )

You're equating fragmentation to speed, which just doesn't hold water. And all of my stuff opens instantly, but that's mostly a function of disk caching and less so of actual FS performance. And I dare you to open one of my ~200 MB spreadsheets instantly - I guarantee you that Windows will open it faster (albiet, not a fair comparison since Ooo can't open it). Both ext4 and NTFS perform fine in 99% of all usage scenarios, NTFS has a number of advantages, as stated above. And my point is: NTFS fragments more, but the fragmentation isn't as big of a deal.

In terms of resizing an NTFS partition outside of Windows, it can't be done properly with the exception of Windows NT, but this is due to a lack of features in the FS driver or kmod itself. As the ext2/3/4 file systems are all FLOSS, they are supported very well outside of Linux.

And JoeSchmukapop: I did point out one big advantage - GNU/Linux can be installed without a GUI and administered over RS232 or any other low speed connection.

Agreed about performance when lightly fragmented. Not to mention despite all those claims about [insert file system here] doesn't fragment, they all do and while it's easy to defrag NTFS should the need arises, I still haven't seen the promised defrag tool of ext4.


It's indeed ambiguous, that's why blanket statement like this is the real "bull$hit". If you have actually dig into the workings of the the many file system you mentioned, you should have known that NTFS is very balanced and well tuned across many use case. It has one of the best worst case performance and handled hardware failure well. Contrary to your belief, handling of large number of files in a directory is one of the area that the ext family perform worse than NTFS. Before ext4, the ext family also sucks at large files, that's why HTPC at that time almost universally used JFS which used extents.


Are you sure you are not measuring anti-virus performance instead?


You are comparing the background indexing software performance.


May be you should try "inode inefficiency".
If you are serious about unbiased analysis, look up how inode pointers work. Even with extents, it still needs more link walking than NTFS.


MFT is not hard to defrag, even before M$ provided the API, numerous programs have been able to do it. The real fact is the defrag API only supports moving MFT in Vista and onwards. That's why to do it on pre-Vista, the defrag program has to write its own engine and not every one has done so.


No, it has nothing to do with fragmentation. The most likely reason is that the space near at the end of the partition is allocated.

Right. It isnt necessarily fragmented but it can be non contiguous allocation. The difference is a fine point but anyone with memories of the earlier defraggers remembers that they collated space to the end of disk/partitions. From XP onwards they seem to have stopped doing that as it is a big waste of time.