[mythtv-users] OT: A major difference between Widows and Linux

[Another Sillyname]

On a slightly more esoteric viewpoint.........

One wants to rule the world......

One will rule the world.......

I'll let you all decide which is which.

On 12 May 2016 at 20:23, Mike Perkins <mikep at randomtraveller.org.uk> wrote:
> On 12/05/16 14:58, Stephen P. Villano wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 5/12/16 8:41 AM, Damian wrote:
>>>
>>> On 12/05/2016 11:02, Simon Hobson wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Damian <myth at surr.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> A fundamental difference between Windows and Linux
>>>>
>>>> Couldn't you have raised a less contentious topic like politics or
>>>> religion :D
>>>>
>>>>> it seems to me, is ...
>>>>> In Linux, if pretty much anything goes wrong, the user needs to
>>>>> enter some commands into the terminal in order to get to the bottom
>>>>> of the problem.
>>>>> In Windows, no matter what goes wrong, there is almost never a
>>>>> 'need' to go to the command line.
>>>>
>>>> Go back a year or three and it's more like :
>>>> In Linux, everything is possible (even if a bit arcane and tricky to
>>>> configure), while in Windows the simple is easy and the difficult is
>>>> impossible (ie if there's no GUI button to click).
>>>> In Linux, when something goes wrong, it'll be isolated to something
>>>> that's visible and fixable, while in Windows it's often easiest to
>>>> just re-install the OS.
>>>>
>>>> On both, times they are a changin'
>>>>
>>>> With SystemD, Linux is rapidly moving over to the Windows ground of
>>>> big binary blobs of obfuscated functionality and many unrelated
>>>> functions rolled up into the one black box - with restricted
>>>> configurability and obfuscated logs that need a special program to
>>>> access. Windows on the other hand, is moving the other way, with
>>>> PowerShell and even Bash now !
>>>>
>>>> As someone else put it, debugging with SystemD is like fault finding
>>>> on electronics with nowhere to stick the voltmeter.
>>>>
>>>> It was often said long ago that "DOS is like Unix with the useful
>>>> stuff taken out" - with PowerShell and Bash, they're finally fixing
>>>> that. A few decades late, but ...
>>>
>>> Thanks everyone,
>>>
>>> I'll not respond to any individual point as I know the topic could
>>> snowball and be an annoying distraction from MythTV.
>>>
>>> Thanks for those of you who responded. Very interesting to read your
>>> thoughts.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Damian
>>
>> I'm still trying to wrap my head around the thinking that one requires
>> the GUI to administer windows systems. I've rarely used the GUI to work
>> on and fix windows systems, I'd psexec a command prompt, examine and fix
>> what was broken, exit and call it a day. I had scripts set to psexec in
>> as well, they'd run in the background, fix a common thing that was
>> broken, exit and call it a day (wsus breaking comes to mind under XP Pro).
>> Linux doesn't have a GUI by default and design, the GUI is added by the
>> distro as a default GUI, which can be changed to an assortment of window
>> managers on top of the X windows system or other interface (kiosk
>> machines come to mind, I used one kiosk to check in for a lab test
>> yesterday, a whopping single button to push to start the process),
>> execute program, accomplish the goal of the task.
>> Windows originated in a DOS world, initially, networking didn't even
>> exist and networking was shoved under the hood, barely fitting
>> initially. Adding high memory helped, as the drivers initially left
>> little usable memory available, mouse, NIC driver, etc using the first
>> 640k of available memory!
>> Yeah, I used to have Windows 1.0 discs around, lost them when my home
>> was emptied out during a long deployment...
>> Windows 95 tightened the GUI and DOS linkage, but didn't eliminate the
>> bolted on effect. I won't go into the ping of death or Microsoft lying
>> about its existence or worse, legal threats made by Microsoft against
>> those reporting the bug... Their decision to switch to Sun Solaris
>> servers, when their NT4 boxes couldn't stay operating, due to "network
>> load issues" (they were being crashed by tens of thousands of scripted
>> ping of death attacks). Windows 2000 finally started cementing the GUI
>> on, with a finer layer of shellac on top of the varnish, covering the
>> cracks.
>>
>> So, where are we today?
>> We've had compromises of Windows hosts on our network, the compromises
>> were all command line attacks, although a couple of successful
>> compromises started at the CLI and ended in an RDP session for the
>> convenience of the attacker. Have the command line, own the host.
>> Which is precisely where we started.
>>
> Having written for both Windows and Linux, and before that for mainframes
> and for single chip processors like the 8080 and Z80, I'll leave the fine
> detail to others. I can make this simple distinction between Windows and
> Linux/Unix:
>
> With Linux, it is assumed that everythings starts off as a process which is
> forked from init or a substitute and even if it creates a GUI the same basic
> underlying program functions the same way that all the others do. All GUI
> interactions for all programs are handled by the X server or an equivalent,
> which is just another user program.
>
> With Windows, every single program starts from the assumption that it has a
> Main Window, even if the user doesn't see it. ALL interactions with each
> program are as the result of interrupt functions to that main window,
> dispatched by the OS scheduler. Sometimes these interrupts are handed off to
> child windows, but the 'window' is the basic unit of Windows programming.
>
> That is the fundamental difference between Windows programming and Unix
> programming.
>
> --
>
> Mike Perkins
>
>
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