this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I think it comes down to the culture. A minuscule improvement to a file system is big news in the Linux community. There's also lots of academic interest in the performance critical parts of the kernel that you just can't emulate with a closed source model. Is anyone writing papers on how to obtain a 2% improvement in the task scheduler on Windows?
Linux dominates the server market, so even small improvements matter when you're talking about a server farm with thousands of machines or the latest supercomputer. Many, many people care about the scalability of Linux. On Windows, we say: NTFS? It's good enough. The user won't notice on modern SSDs.
A lot of the software components under the hood in Linux are replaceable.
So you have a bunch of different CPU and disk IO schedulers to suit different workloads, the networking stack and memory management can be tweaked to hell and back, etc etc.
Meanwhile Windows Server 2022 has...... ?