The Expert Chooses Linux Over Microsoft

This is a story of how one person, Keith Curtis, liked the operating system Linux over Microsoft. He worked for Microsoft for some time but for some reason, decided to quit and join Linux. When he joined Linux, what he installed was the Red Hat’s Fedora Core 3.

Kurtis was quite impressed after the Red Hat’s Fedora Core 3 has been installed because it had a graphical installer that ran all the way up to completion. While at it, it conveniently resized the NTFA partition. It also set up dual boot while allowing him to surf the Internet. Right then, he saw the potential the Linux has.

Kurtis, though, realized that even if Linux had great potential, it still was not on a trajectory to work for desktops. Let’s talk about the Linux Kernel. When you talk about the kernel of an operating system, it’s the very first software that the PC executes. It also mediates access to the hardware and manages it as well. All the different hardware in the PC would need its own corresponding kernel device driver that makes them all run first before the software can be used.

Although not known among desktops, Linux is used on a wide range among servers and embedded devices since it lends support to thousands of different devices while being clean, fast and reliable at the same time. The free software stack that is Linux-based took as much effort as the creation of the Space Shuttle.

The basic Linux Kernel operates on 8,000,000 lines of code that represents 4,000 man-years of engineering. If you were to add the amount of free software of Linux, together with the word processor, the web browser and the media player, the lines of code would be 10 times more than the kernel. And it would even be more if non-coding tasks such as writing documentation, artwork creating, strings translation and bug reporting are included.

Kurtis recalls how he primarily joined Microsoft because he thought the Windows New Technology kernel, still being used in Windows Vista today, was going to lead the brains of all computers and later on, robots all over the world. Bill Gates’ realized that the creation of the Microsoft DOS kernel, the biggest moneymaker, and later on became the Windows 9x kernel, was not actually a noteworthy engineering effort. He had to hire David Cutler of Digital Equipment Corporation to create a team that would build the Windows New Technology kernel.

Although Windows is popular when it comes to devices and servers, it never became as popular with desktop computers. One possible reason for this is that the code was not available for further extension and improvement. As for the Linux kernel, it was readily available for all the people of the world to tweak it so that it can run on their own hardware. It is simply because the Linux kernel came free when Windows NT was not available for computer experts to manipulate. That makes the Linux kernel more powerful than Windows NT kernel.

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