LINUX AND WINDOWS OPERATING SYSTEM COMPARISON

OPERATING SYSTEM COMPARISON

Operating System Comparison

Michael Conklin

May 29, 2008�

Introduction

As told by Severance, (2008) UNIX was originally developed at Bell Laboratories as a private research project by a small group of people starting in 1969. Linus Torvalds, who was then a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, developed Linux in 1991. It was released for free on the Internet and generated the largest software-development phenomena of all time (Linux's History, 2000). Today UNIX owns about 10% of the market share and this has dropped in recent years as both Windows and Linux have increased their share of the available market with Linux currently holding about 20% (Galli, 2007).

As noted by Windows History (2006), many longtime PC users trace the Microsoft Windows operating system to the 1990 release of Windows 3.0, the first widely popular version of Windows and the first version of Windows many PC users ever tried.

Windows XP screenshot

Figure 1

Figure 2

However, Microsoft initially announced the Windows product seven years earlier and released the first version in 1983.

In its early offerings, Windows was still based upon the Disk Operating System (DOS), but it brought a much needed Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the mainstream computer market and began and evolution (or revolution) of the computing industry which resulted in Microsoft owning about 70% of the world-wide market share (Galli, 2007).

This paper will compare and contrast UNIX (Knoppix) and Windows in the following areas:

Operating System Cost

Operating System Market Share

Operating System Hardware Requirements

Operating System File Processing

Operating System Programming Capabilities

Operating System Application Availability

Operating System User Interface

Operating System Cost

Linux is the second most sold and the fastest growing server operating system today. For desktop or home use, Linux is very cheap or free, while...