Comparison of windows and Linux

Windows vs Linux

The biggest difference between Windows and Linux is that Linux is open source whereas Windows is closed source. Also on Windows once you buy a copy you can only install it onto one computer without paying extra. Because Linux is open sourced this means that Linux has a lot of different version made by different people and has a lot of updates. Linux gets updates very quickly however with Windows there aren’t that many updates and you have to wait a long time for a new version.

Since lots of things on Linux are open source this means that the coding for the operating system is available for free and you can change and redistribute in whatever way you like. This means you can customise nearly anything to how you want it or if you don’t know how, get somebody else to do it. With Windows you can only customise the size and colour of the graphics not the actual code like you can with Linux.

However in support terms Windows is slightly better because there is a huge amount of help and support online as well as books, whereas with Linux it may be hard to find somebody else with the same Linux version and less people use Linux so there will be less people to help. Windows has more users so there is a larger variety of software because programmers tend to make software for the most popular operating system. Windows has a bigger and better variety of software than Linux but for most of the software you have to pay for it. With Linux there isn’t as much software available but most of it is freeware or open source.

Windows uses FAT12, FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS. However the FAT files are much older and have a limitation on the file and partition size so NTFS is the best choice. The default file system for Linux used to ext2 but it has now developed into ext3. The main difference in the files structure between the two operating systems is the file hierarchy. Windows uses different letters to symbolize different drives e.g. C: D:. Linux uses a root directory as the source for all other directories and all the directories are connected to this root directory. The root directory is symbolised by a forward slash. Inside the root directory there is twelve second level directories including /bin/, /data/, /home/ and many more. These second level directories then have many more directories branching off them.