Top Five Things Linux Can Learn from Microsoft

[Will.Spencer]

Top Five Things Linux Can Learn from Microsoft
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
July 24, 2006

Opinion: Linux fans may hate Microsoft, but Linux could learn a lot from the Evil Empire.

Linux does a lot of things right—open source, security, reliability—but it's far from perfect. In fact, Linux and its vendors could stand to learn a few things from Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft. Like what? Here's my list of the top five things that Linux could learn from Microsoft.

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[darviria]

I'd disagree with point 2 though, MS do change their interfaces and they move things around, as I've said before, they make it look different so that all the stupid people will think it's changed and buy it.

Linux has a very common interface, a command line, it does exactly what I tell it to and I don't have to look around for anything. It saves a lot of time if you're not messing around with a GUI.

[Will.Spencer]

The Unix command line is anything but unchanging. How many shells are there? (sh, csh, tcsh, ksh, bash, etc...)

Worse, the commands change. I constantly have to think "Is it `ps -ef` or `ps -aux` on this box?" pg vs. more vs. less? I believe most Linux systems support all three.

Worse, Unix files are all over the place -- even within the Linux family. Do you ever find yourself thinking "OK, which bloody startup files does this system support?"

And then we can talk about software updating mechanisms. Makefiles? Configure? Ports? Packages? Which package system?

Unix is a mess. That's unavoidable, Unix is old and Comp. Sci. has come a long way since Unix was young.

I'm a huge Unix fan, but let's not pretend that we don't have our own problems.

[darviria]

With *nix, I usually just stick to one system as much as possible, for my everyday home use at least, the one thing that Linux can learn from MS is standardisation, but it doesn't have standards because it's open source and while it's still open source it's unlikely to be standardised.

Ok I understand your point, but consider it based on one distro, it doesn't often change drastically between versions as much as windows does, sure there's differences between different distros but they're released by different people.

It would be great if MS-DOS was more powerful...and people still used it


Here's an example, to change an IP address, in windows you have to click through several menus and dialog boxes then enter the IP and netmask in some stupid boxes that I always press tab on and mess up, obviously designed for idiots that don't know how an IP address is structured. Now to do it in Linux, all I do is type a simple command at the command line, it's done in at least half the time as I could do it in windows. Maybe there is a command to do it in MSDOS, if so please let me know...not that I have to do it under windows very often :P

[Will.Spencer]

Ohh... I agree... I am a Unix bigot at heart.

Changing IP addresses is one of the worst examples of how annoying Windows can be to use.

Why can't ipconfig be as good as ifconfig?

There is no good reason why ipconfig has to be so unacceptably inferior!

[darviria]

People might not see the problem with that but if you're doing something like configuring a lot of wireless access points or routers, you don't want to be clicking through and waiting for window's stupid gui. Networking in Windows is awful

I still say the cause of most of Linux's problems is also one of the best things about it, the fact that it's open source, it's both good and bad.

[Will.Spencer]

Have you played at all with Windows Script?

Windows Script lets you do Visual Basic or JScript from the Windows command line.

And, of course, there is always PERL for Windows.