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Discussion on: Windows and Linux: A Sane Discussion

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tonymet profile image
Tony Metzidis • Edited

I think it's better to compare them to particular use cases, e.g. production hosting, development, gaming, general productivity on desktop, media server, etc.

Production hosting linux is ideal, because of broader app environment compatibility (e.g. node, php, python, golang, etc), better debugging (gdb), better remote management (bash, perl , python, chef, puppet, etc)

Development: More competitive. Personally I prefer Windows as the core OS and then VMs running linux. This way hardware is well managed (e.g. networking, battery, display drivers). Best of both worlds.

Gaming: Windows -- no brainer

Media server: overall windows IMO due to codec and hardware compatibility, but with the right build linux can compete.

NAS: linux hands down. I would go with specialty NAS appliance like qnas / synology but even a home-built linux server is more flexible due to various daemons for file hosting.

Productivity: Windows wins here. 80% of offices run MS Office.

tl;dr : Buy a PC, run Windows 10, and develop using WSL2 or Linux VM + cloud instances

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_hs_ profile image
HS

I think, if big software houses and gaming companies did more support and development for Linux, Windows would be gone long time ago. However MS held monopoly on support for games, drivers, and office tools and that in my head makes the main reason why people didn't get used to it. Imaging having support for MS Office, Adobe tools and games by same companies that made them on Linux. Would you ever use Windows? This way they pushed as much as they could by playing a little dirty and gave up so now you have .NET Core written in VS Code on GNU/Linux machine, Azure offering Linux stuff, Steam and others making effort to enable gaming on Linux... I think it's pretty much heading to Windows UI running on Linux with support for DirectX and such.

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