The world’s most popular operating system is Windows, which is made by the Microsoft Corporation. Linux has no links with Windows at all. Microsoft doesn’t contribute anything to Linux and, in fact, is rather hostile toward it, because it threatens Microsoft’s market dominance. This means that installing Linux can give you an entirely Microsoft-free PC. How enticing does that sound?
Windows is used on 91 percent of the world’s desktop computers. In other words, it must be doing a good job for it to be so popular, right?
Let’s face facts. On many levels, Windows is a great operating system, and since the release of Windows XP in particular, Microsoft has cleaned up its act. Windows XP does a much better job compared to previous versions of Windows (and Vista makes even more improvements). But the situation is far from perfect. Windows XP is notoriously insecure and virtually every day a new security hole is uncovered. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (www.us-cert.gov) reported 812 security vulnerabilities for Microsoft Windows during 2005. That’s 15 vulnerabilities per week! In June 2005, the computer security company Sophos (www.sophos.com) advertised that its Windows antivirus program defended against over 103,000 viruses!
This has led to an entire industry that creates antivirus programs, which are additional pieces of software you have to install once your computer is up and running for it to run without the risk of data loss or data theft.
There have been a couple of viruses for Linux, but they’re no longer “in the wild” (that is, they are no longer infecting PCs). This is because the security holes they exploited were quickly patched, causing the viruses to die out. This happened because the majority of Linux users update their systems regularly, so any security holes that viruses might exploit are patched promptly. Compare that to Windows, where most users aren’t even aware they can update their systems, even when Microsoft gets around to issuing a patch (which has been known to take months).
So is Linux the solution to these problems? Most would agree that it’s a step in the right direction, at the very least. Most Linux users don’t install antivirus programs, because there are virtually no Linux-specific viruses. As with all software, security holes are occasionally discovered in Linux, but the way it is built means exploiting those holes is much more difficult.
There’s also the fact that Linux encourages you to take control of your computer, as opposed to treating it like a magical box. As soon as you install Linux, you become a power user. Every aspect of your PC is under your control, unlike with Windows. This means fixing problems is a lot easier, and optimizing your system becomes part and parcel of the user experience.
Source of Information : Apress Beginning Ubuntu Linux 3rd Edition
2 comments:
Your article only scratches the surface about what is wrong with Windows. The biggest problem with Windows is that it is from Microsoft and the problem with that is their business model which is top down and market driven. In contrast Linux is community driven and it is user centered. This means that it is a better fit for almost everybody.
The only advantage that Microsoft has is market dominance which has been due to immoral and illegal business practices as determined by several courts. People run Windows because they don't know any better or think that they have no alternative, not because it is better.
In fact, this model begins to work against Microsoft because people have no loyalty to the company since once you buy the product you are on your own, unless you work for a company that employs IT staff to troubleshoot. People are universally miserable with Windows, but misery likes company, as they say. There is little comfort in this in the end.
The solution is to stop acting like lemmings and take control of your own computer. With Linux you say goodbye to security problems, including viruses and trojans, defragging hard drives, wasting money on software that does not work as advertised and DRM. It is time to stop whining about the problems and do something about it.
Windows' days are numbered. Vista sucks and Microsoft is adrift. It has been a long time since it has enjoyed any success. XP is ancient history. NTFS and FAT32 are old file systems. Anything new it tries is a failure. Think of VMs, Zune, Xbox HDDVD and Vista and you think of M$ failure. Even IE is losing market share and it once had such dominance that it was thought unassailable.
Microsoft has nothing good to build on and its once deep pockets aren't so deep. It would buy Linux if it could, but you can't buy it since it isn't for sale.
Life after M$ is sweet indeed. Don't take my word for it. Try it for yourself.
With Vista, Microsoft is finally taking security where it should have been all along: Designing the software to actually be secure, rather than designing it to just work.
I'd say that security is the least of Windows' problems. Windows Vista has (unfairly?) gained a reputation as being bloated, intrusive, and incompatible with software and drivers before it. Microsoft needs to battle this.
Mac users can wipe the smirk off their faces too, as there seems to be no end of embarrassing schoolboy security blunders being fixed in OS X; the latest being "Use Applescript to tell this setuid root program to run a shell script as root" and "Please store my cleartext passwords in world-readable locations".
We won't see the former in Vista because of its more secure IAC (not UAC) model, and we probably won't see many of the latter either.
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