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by soraminazuki
144 days ago
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Modern Linux supports asynchronous I/O. It's debatable whether NT's lack of memory overcommitting is a superior choice. OS personalities have never been relevant outside of marketing and might even be technical debt at this point, as virtualization offers a more effective solution with significantly less complexity. Moreover, the Linux kernel maintains a stable ABI. Much of the discussion surrounding NT's supposed superiority is outdated or superficial at best. Linux, on the other hand, offers several advantages that actually matters. It supports a wider variety of filesystems natively, with FUSE providing exceptional utility. Linux also accommodates more architectures and allows for more creative applications through features like User Mode Linux and the Linux Kernel Library. It also has a more robust debugging ecosystem thanks to its large community and open source nature. All of these things are possible because Linux isn't bound by a single company's commercial interests. Also, is Microsoft putting as much effort into NT these days? I find it hard to believe they care about NT when they stopped caring about what runs on top of it, leading to articles like this one. |
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Not nearly to the depth and breth of NT. NT is async I/O throughout. Linux has a bunch of libs that ride on top of pretend async I/O with io_uring as a more recent bonus.
> It's debatable whether NT's lack of memory overcommitting is a superior choice.
NT won't randomly kill a process. That's the winning play.
> OS personalities have never been relevant outside of marketing
Until you've used them for non-marketing purposes, then they're invaluable. Personalities existed when virtualization didn't exist on x86.
> Moreover, the Linux kernel maintains a stable ABI.
The only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.
> It supports a wider variety of filesystems natively,
Most distros suggest ext4 out of the box. Sysadmins are going to deploy ZFS where it counts. Some might use XFS. Having access to a ton of file systems is great, but the usage outside of ext4 is going to be comparatively low. ext4 is the only FS I'd want to see as first-party on Windows as a data drive. But that would have been more important before persuasive networking.
> with FUSE providing exceptional utility
FUSE is also on Win32 via https://winfsp.dev/rel/.
> It also has a more robust debugging ecosystem thanks to its large community and open source nature.
This ignores the debugging tools on Win32 by a country mile.
> is Microsoft putting as much effort into NT these days
Yes. Even if you do the bare minimum investigative effort and follow the "what's new" for each version of Windows, you can see the kernel-level investment. Much of this is around security and isolation of kernel components. There is also Microsoft in talks (finally, again) with EDR vendors to isolate their solutions; hopefully game devs are next.
> leading to articles like this one.
This isn't an article. It's an uninformed blog post.