Linux and NT – The myths exposed

1999-10-13

There’s been a lot of press recently concerning Microsoft’s recent presentation of its Linux Myths web site. By coincidence, and to right the wrong expressed by Microsoft that “Linux Needs Real World Proof Points”, Bloor Research published today the results of its operational comparison between Linux and Windows NT.

The report was based on a study of both operating systems from the standpoint of how they operated in practice to support real applications. It was possible to rank the products according to the following nine criteria: Cost/Value for Money, User Satisfaction, Application Support, OS Interoperability, OS Scalability, OS Availability, OS Support, Operational Features and OS Functionality. The products were also ranked according to appropriate usage, in the following areas of application: File/Print server, mixed workload server, Web server, mail server, database server, groupware server, data mart, application server and enterprise level server.

The results of ranking the products showed Linux to be superior to Windows NT in seven of the nine categories, by a significant amount for some and by a short head in others. The comparison by application type came down less strongly in favour of Linux, with each operating systems seen as optimal for certain applications. Bloor Research found neither product suitable for use as an Enterprise Level Server.

Clearly the Windows NT – versus – Linux debate will run on and on, particularly with the launch of Windows 2000, which will see a significant number of additional features to the operating system (not least its ability to be reconfigured without being rebooted, which has long been the bane of NT systems administrators). Linux remains, above all else, free and capable of supporting a wide range of uses, although it is clearly not suitable for everything.

Microsoft are learning a hard lesson with Linux, namely that there is more to life than product marketing. Five years ago there was the NT versus Unix debate, which the Unix community appeared to be losing until Microsoft attempted to tackle the issue of enterprise scalability and convinced no-one. This gave the end users a new set of perspectives, that it was OK to use the right operating system for the job and that the concept of a single OS which could run on the smallest device up to the largest server was inappropriate, not to say unachievable. These perspectives hold true today: NT is suitable for a variety of tasks, but remains inadequate for a whole set of others. At the end of the day, any comparison will

(First published 13 October 1999)