Operating system advocacy
Operating system advocacy is an attempt to increase the awareness of a given computer operating system, hopefully resulting in more users of that system. The assumption being that more users will lead, directly or indirectly, to greater improvement in the operating system ("OS"), and even in the computing world in general for using the system. It is most commonly used to refer to OS's that are in the minority of use, to compare to the OS that the majority already use. A further assumption being that most of the users of the majority OS only use it because they are familiar with it or they are locked in. Advocacy of the majority OS is most often in reaction to the sometimes over zealous advocacy of the minority OS's.
Advocacy is one of the common pastimes of those who have a deep and abiding interest in the design, construction and usage of operating systems. For these people, the investment necessary -- both in money and time -- to own and operate a computer sometimes creates an emotional investment in their operating system of choice. Such emotional ties can lead to advocacy that can induce emotional arguments as people compare and contrast the virtues and faults of different operating systems.
These visceral debates most notably include:
Some wars of the past related to:
There are related wars over programming languages and text editors (emacs vs vi; see Editor war).
Here are some of the arguments, false or otherwise, which advocates of supposedly opposing operating systems may use.
Desktop systems
Estimated market share: 90%; Microsoft Windows enjoys a near monopoly in the desktop OS market
Audience: all markets. Most dominant in business, though it has the lion's share of the market in all sectors.
Pro
- Large market share
- Incredible range of compatible software and hardware
- Most software makes use of a fairly consistent user interface, easing the process of getting up to speed with a new program
- Primary applications - Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office - from same source as OS ensures compatibility
- A perception of more available support
Con
- Complex code
- Microsoft's business practices (anticompetitive, privacy-invading, monopolistic)
- Feature limitations
- High cost, particularly for corporate or education licenses.
- Primary applications from Microsoft discourage third-party alternatives, either by their quality, their ability to create lock in, or both
- Frequently targeted by malicious crackers (aka. hackers), worms and viruses
- Software may contain spyware, adware or similar, which are often referred to as malware, or "bad software".
- Existence of "private" APIs that are available to Microsoft applications but not divulged to third parties - this gives Microsoft an unfair advantage when creating applications for its own platform. Reverse engineering by third parties to overcome these obstacles often mysteriously "breaks" with new OS updates.
Estimated market share: 5-10%
Audience: education (30-50%), arts (graphic design, video/film editing, sound editing), science.
Pro
- Productive and intuitive
- Simplicity
- Reliability
- Underlying Mach-like operating system provides many of the benefits of UNIX or Linux, including inherently secure design, command line utilities and the ability to run many UNIX programs (including Apache, MySQL, sendmail, etc)
- "iApps" - iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, etc. - high quality applications included with OS
- Increasing compatibility with Windows and Linux, especially over networks.
- Usually has the newest technologies (802.11, FireWire, USB) implemented before other vendors
- Total cost of ownership (TCO) is demonstrably lower than e.g. Windows
- Aesthetic design (both hardware and software)
- Very understandable, integrated system
- "Single-source" OS, cpu, and major applications ensures better compatibility
- Rarely targeted by malicious hackers, worms and viruses
- Rapid, reliable response from Apple with security software patches.
- Responsive, supportive user community
- Bundled vendor and free tools, eg gcc, cocoa, interface builder and xcode, allow rapid application development
Con
- Relatively small market-share compared to Microsoft Windows
- Only runs on Apple's proprietary hardware architecture
- Less available software, and to a lesser extent, hardware devices (though Macs use standard USB and FireWire peripherals, and have class drivers for the majority of devices - most PC hardware will "just work" even if it doesn't say Mac on the box)
- Legacy applications are not natively supported (Mac OS 9 applications and earlier require a compatibility layer called Classic to run, which reduces performance)
- No ability to customize the user interface without third party hacks
- iApps discourage third party development of core applications, potentially due to their already high quality
- Sometimes not taken seriously in a Windows crowd.
- Considerable prejudice against the platform, usually based on ignorance - this is something the Mac user has to learn to put up with.
- Third party development of 3D graphics card tends to be behind Wintel (The Mac uses OpenGL cards, which usually come out after the equivalent Direct3D cards).
Estimated market share: 2-5%
Audience: information technology, computer science, software engineers, educators, cost-saving measure used by companies and governments.
Pro
- High Stability. The operating system is rarely the failure point, in "crashing", etc.
- Low purchase cost (free on most distributions)
- High flexibility and freedom
- Hobbyist atmosphere
- Large community; allows free user support by advocates
- Commercial support available
- With desktop managers such as KDE and GNOME, Linux offers a graphical user interface much like the MacOS/Windows interface, in addition to the traditional Unix command line.
- Many free or otherwise gratis software packages offer the functionality of programs available on the other desktop operating systems.
- Rarely targeted by worms and viruses
- Fewer security holes
- Some distributions are Security focused operating systems
- Linux is a Free Software operating system, which gives you the freedom to access, modify and redistribute the source code of any part of it.
- Open development style and a license that requires distributed changes to be made available in source code for others means that future changes will be available for everyone. What anyone contributes, all must benefit from. In the long run, it may be impossible for proprietary OS vendors to compete with this.
Con
- Some features of proprietary operating systems may not be available yet.
- Lack of formal support in free versions
- Possible hidden costs. Different ways of doing common tasks may take more time initially.
- Migration costs. Users of other OSes face retraining, application compatibility testing, and potential lower initial productivity as users learn new ways of using the OS instead of getting work done. This initial cost may well be more than offset in the long run. This is the total cost of ownership argument.
- Small market-share
- Lack of closed-source applications (this can also be seen as a pro, but many users, especially corporate users, only look at what applications are available for purchase.)
- Lack of a single target to write applications to. An application cannot be written for "Linux" and expected to work on every distribution without significant knowledge of each distribution's differences. It may need to be ported to each distribution.
- Desktop managers widely seen as too geek-oriented and not user-oriented; supposedly difficult to use compared with commercial GUIs.
- Many essential tools lack consistency in syntax or semantics, undermining ease of learning (learning to use a new tool can become a "research project")
- Some powerful tools (e.g. the shell) are unnecessarily complicated
- Initial setup process varies greatly among distributions
- Installing new software difficult, too many bizarre dependencies and issues
- Incomplete hardware support (USB, Firewire, "Winmodems", some video cards etc.) Linux drivers are often neglected by hardware manufacturers, adoption of newest technologies is relatively slower than proprietary systems.
- Lack of significant multilingual features. In languages other than English, Linux market size is significantly smaller.
- No standard GUI (although this too can be seen as an advantage)
Server Systems
Many of the same arguments as for the operating systems used for desktop purposes, but some specific advantages and disadvantages due to being applied in a server situation.
Microsoft Windows
Pro
- Ease of configuration for basic tasks
- Corporate management personnel tend to be more comfortable with it due to the feeling of one large successful entity being responsible for it
- Faster at file sharing than Linux
- Alleged lower TCO than Linux
- Vulnerabilities fixed faster
Con
- Expensive software licenses
- Difficult to move configuration from one machine to another: nearly all configuration is done through a GUI often making it difficult to do repetitive changes to multiple machines.
- Difficulty of configuring anything that the GUI designer did not think of ahead of time, potentially results in reduced customizability
- Frequently exploited by malicious hackers, worms and viruses
- Stability sometimes problematic (low uptime)
- Low performance in some uses or applications
- Need recent, expensive hardware to be able to run recent versions
- Moderate to low level of security, slow fixes
Pro
- Initial cost can be low
- Freedom (open source)
- Stability
- Diverse hardware support
- Due to being open source and other factors, like a widespread community backing, Linux has the potential to be the most rapidly progressing operating system
- For a moderately skilled administator, ease of installation, management, and availability of free and paid support
- Its support of most file systems in common use makes it especially good for mixed-platform environments
- Most configuration is done by editing text files greatly contributing the ease of automated maintenance or large scale repetitive changes
- Linux is a Free Software operating system, which gives you the freedom to access, modify and redistribute the source code of any part of it, so long as you release your changes for others to do the same.
- For some applications, such as web servers, it is one of the most common platforms and is thus well served with software and hardware (see LAMP)
- Has a lot of commonality with other Unix-like operating systems
Con
- Most configuration is done by editing text files or using command-line utilities, which Windows and Macintosh GUI users may find cumbersome; system administration usually must be performed by someone who is familiar with these files and utilities (compared to Windows or Mac OSX where many server admin tasks may be "point-and-click"). (GUI admin utilities exist but are neither standardized nor commonly used.)
- While all command-line tools have some documentation in the form of online manual pages, these help documents are usually just technical references; the purchase of a well-written book on Linux system administration is almost always necessary.
- According to critics, the total cost of ownership (TCO) is higher with Linux than with other easier systems because Linux requires more tech support.
- Less secure than traditional Unices. Due to the strong political and philosophical convictions of Richard Stallman, GNU su, used in almost all Linux distributions, does not have the ability to restrict access to the root account via a wheel group .
Pro
- Extremely stable, even under enormous (enterprise in the jargon) workloads
- Long history of success
Con
- High cost (depending on licensing)
- Expensive for small workloads because Solaris does not run as well on PC hardware as it does on Sun hardware, which is expensive
- Support from Sun is expensive
- Many of the same features as Linux, due to both being open source systems. See FreeBSD and Linux for a direct comparison of those two operating systems. Mistakenly thought of as only a server OS. It has the same desktop components available as Linux and other open source operating systems.
Pro
- No purchase cost
- High degree of freedom - source code is available. Anything that is possible to do with the hardware can be done
- License allows modifying the code and either distributing changes or not, depending on the choice of the developer.
- Design coherence
- Long, proven history of extraordinary reliability
- BSDs have a unified kernel and userland: the kernel and userland are specifically tested (and versioned) for each other. This, along with the coherent, no-surprise directory structure, gives an excellent sense of a well-designed system
- The ports tree makes for a very easy way to download new software: locating, configuring, compiling, recursive dependency handling are all taken care of
- Re-building system software is also exceedingly easy with the automated full system building tools
- Linux compatibility lets you run Linux binaries that manufacturers haven't released as source
- Excellent speed and stability
- Most configuration is done by editing text files, greatly contributing the ease of automated maintenance or large scale repetitive changes
- Great effort goes into documentation; the man pages are generally complete and helpful, and the FreeBSD Handbook is a good resource that is available for free
Con
- Most configuration is done by editing text files or using command-line utilities, which Windows and Macintosh GUI users may find cumbersome; system administration usually must be performed by someone who is familiar with these files and utilities (compared to Windows or Mac OSX where many server admin tasks may be "point-and-click"). (GUI admin utilities exist but are neither standardized nor commonly used.)
- While all command-line tools have some documentation in the form of online manual pages, these help documents are usually just technical references, not introductory documentation.
- Possibly somewhat less focus on the desktop and ease of use than Linux, can lead to the appearance that it is not suitable for the same users.
Pro
- No cost
- High degree of freedom
- Portability: NetBSD's slogan is "Of course it runs NetBSD!" While FreeBSD focuses primarily on the i386 architecture and its successors, NetBSD has greatly increased the number of supported platforms
- NetBSD runs on more architectures than any other known OS. Allows running the same operating system on a handheld and a network server
- It has a long, proven history of reliability
Con
- NetBSD is widely ported, but finding a recent distribution for obscure architectures can be difficult
- Most configuration is done by editing text files or using command-line utilities, which Windows and Macintosh GUI users may find cumbersome; system administration usually must be performed by someone who is familiar with these files and utilities (compared to Windows or Mac OSX where many server admin tasks may be "point-and-click"). (GUI admin utilities exist but are neither standardized nor commonly used.)
- While all command-line tools have some documentation in the form of online manual pages, these help documents are usually just technical references; the purchase of a well-written book on BSD system administration is a necessity
Pro
- OpenBSD is one of the most secure versions of Unix, using integrated cryptography and proactive security measures, including extensive security auditing. This has led to a record of perhaps the fewest remotely executable security holes of any freely and commonly available operating system
- Many security features are available that are either not available or much less well integrated into other operating systems, eg systrace
- Project focus on security leads to security not being an afterthought, or just a set of features, but integrated in and always taken into account in design decisions. (see Security focused operating systems)
- It is free, and supports a variety of hardware platforms.
- It has a long, proven history of reliability
- Much code of OpenBSD flows back to other *BSD Projects, thus making them more secure.
Con
- Some users dislike the personality of the system's maintainer, Theo de Raadt
- Some critics say that most of OpenBSD's security is just due to the fact that the operating system is installed with almost every daemon turned off by default
- In late 2003 a report was released claiming scalability problems, making it a poor choice for certain tasks involving high system load, which has been used as an argument against OpenBSD. OpenBSD advocates claim this report was biased.
Pro
- Like OSX, Mac OS X Server is based, in part, on BSD, with a "friendlier" GUI
- The latest (Panther) mail server is Postfix
- Other UNIX-based server tools are available
- User management is based on NeXT's NetInfo but compatible with LDAP
Con
- Command-line users may dislike the GUI management tools; though the command-line tools are available, it may be difficult to determine what actions GUI tools are taking
- Macintosh and Windows NT/2K/XP users may dislike having to occasionally edit configuration files by hand
See also
- Note that market share can refer to either new sales or to installed base, which give very different numbers. This kind of information should be spelled out by people with a comprehensive picture.
- Because Macintosh computers have a longer usage lifetime than Windows computers, their installed base is greater than their share of new sales.
- Also, market share numbers for market segments. For example, the market share for Linux in the server market is much higher than for the desktop market.
- One definition of the term "market share" refers to the dollar value of new sales. Because Linux is free software, many copies are freely redistributed outside the economic market.
- Since most desktop and notebook computers sold by the big OEM companies are sold with the "Windows Tax", this could increase the Windows market-share artificially since the user could very well use another OS instead.
- cost can mean either total cost of ownership (TCO) or the actual amount of currency required to obtain the operating system, which is a more precise and less disputed definition.
- It is worth bearing in mind Sturgeon's Law.
