COMPARISON OF UNIX, LINUX AND MICROSOFT

Comparison of UNIX, Linux and Microsoft

Comparison of UNIX, Linux and Microsoft

Introduction

There are three basic types of operating system in use today. UNIX, Linux and Solaris are on one group, then Windows, and then Mac. There are 7 major factors that affect a choice on each of the systems not including the Mac. In this paper, we compare UNIX, Linux and Microsoft Windows across these seven categories (Toxen, 2002):

Cost

Market Share

Hardware requirements

File processing

Programming capabilities

Avaibability of application sofrware

User interface

Cost and Market Share

There are a quite a few advantages to using Microsoft products over Linux. It is true that Linux source is freely available and users can build a good reliable system using it but to build a Linux system, a user needs good knowledge of a compiler program to compile the kernel and build the basic system, good knowledge of the Linux/Unix file system, the ability to scour through the net and find programs freely available to use and a good chunk of time. How much knowledge is required to use Microsoft operating system? Not much, it's really built for people with little to no skills except maybe how to use a mouse and keyboard.

The second is in the support field; hands up if you know a Linux guru, they are rare and they spout free software with one hand and charge a hundred bucks an hour with another. Now throw a rock into a crowd and you'll hit a Windows expert and if you shop around you probably get one cheap because they haven't had to be super programmers before they could learn the inner workings of the OS. Now let's get to software.

Can Linux compete with Microsoft and cut into the market share? According to the Yankee Group's 2005 survey of 500 American companies the answer is no. Linux has held its ground with 15% of the market share while Microsoft has 73% and other operating systems have 12%.

Microsoft Windows has the market where they want them and there is very low probability that companies will switch completely from Microsoft to Linux. However, Linux does maintain a strong server presence, 60% of the companies polled by the Yankee Group said that Linux was installed somewhere in their organization (Taylor, 2004). "An overwhelming 88% of corporations report that Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Server 2003 operating system provides equal to or better performance and reliability than Linux in comparable usage scenarios (Taylor, 2004)."

Hardware Requirements

Over the last several years the UNIX companies and broader Linux community, along with hardware manufacturers, have put a great deal of effort into improving the hardware support available for Linux. Windows on the other hand has an enormous user base and as a result enjoys almost limitless driver support. There are complete web sites dedicated to supporting hardware devices running in a Windows environment such as www.drivers.com. With the majority of corporate and personal computers worldwide running Microsoft Windows a good majority of hardware manufacturers will support their products in Microsoft Windows ...