

Linux Uptake Is Getting Serious; Windows Struggles To Keep Up - cassandravoiton
http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2011/04/linux-is-uptake-getting-serious-windows.html
Looks like the days of assuming Windows is the major platform have well the truly gone!
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ScottBurson
I worked for a company that was building a low-latency real-time platform for
applications like financial trading. We shipped on both Linux and Windows. As
I recall, our latency on Linux was fairly reliably under 1 ms, while on
Windows it was often more like 15ms. In short, the Windows scheduler was
nowhere near adequate for real time work.

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TomOfTTB
As someone who has worked with Windows or Supervised people who worked with
Windows for most of the last decade I can confirm this type of behavior.

What I've noticed about Windows is that certain bugs just seem to linger. I
can list about 30 bugs that have been around since Windows 2000 and which are
still in Windows 7 today.

So clearly what Microsoft is doing much of the time is just layering on more
and more features without doing much to the base functions of the Operating
System. That's why these basic bugs persist because no one's touched that code
in years (at least that's my theory).

And that's also why you get such bottlenecks.

Linux is less prone to feature-itis because the companies doing the real work
on it aren't interested in meaningless features as much as they're interested
in stability and performance. So you get a situation where the Windows code is
constantly getting more verbose while the Linux code is constantly becoming
more optimized.

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cassandravoiton
I think it is a philosophy thing was well. Latency and network speed are key
Unix heratige features which carry over to Linux. Windows has always
considered this as something we should do, but not core.

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TomOfTTB
One point I would make is that being a Linux developer is harder than being a
Windows developer. Giving Developers neat new tools to expedite development is
something Microsoft does well.

So while the figure about them being paid more is probably true the Skill
Level-To-Pay ratio is probably more attractive on the Windows side.

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zdw
_I wonder if Linux developers have better sex lives as well?_

Yes.

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sybreon
We do? o_O

