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Windows versus Linux Essay

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Windows vs. LINUX

Both Windows and Linux come in many different forms. All the different forms of Windows come from Microsoft, the various distributions of Linux come from different companies (ex. Red Hat, SuSE, Linspire, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Knoppix, etc). Windows has two main lines: “Win9x”, which is consists of Windows 95, 98, 98SecondEdition and ME, and “NT class” which consists of Windows NT, 200 and XP. On a side note, Windows first had version 3.x which was made before Windows 95 by a couple of years. The various types of Linux are called distributions. All the Linux distributions released around the same time frame will use the same kernel, which are the guts of the OS. They will differ with the add-on software provided, …show more content…

Some, like Lindows, do not write anything on the hard disk. There is a downside to running an OS from a CD is speed and continuity. Versions such as SuSE, use the hard disk. What you gain in speed, you give up in safety. Now a days you are not limited to just a CD, you can now have a Linux distribution run from a flash drive.

Windows and Linux provide a GUI (Graphical User Interface) and a command line interface. The Windows GUI has changed dramatically from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, slightly to Windows 2000, big change to Windows XP and is scheduled to change again with the new version of Windows recently named Vista. Themes is a feature in Windows which lets you customize to an extent the look of your GUI. Linux typically provides two GUIs, KDE and Gnome. Of the major distributions, Lindows has made their user interface resemble Windows a lot more than the others. Text mode interface is also known as a command interpreter. Windows users know this as DOS prompt. It is called a shell in Linux. Windows has a single command interpreter but the different types of Windows have different interpreters. Linux, just as all versions of UNIX, supports multiple command interpreters, but Linux usually uses one called BASH (Bourne Again Shell). A few other shells are the C shell, ash shell, and the bourne shell.

There are an enormous amount of malicious software programs. The most common types are known as viruses and spyware. Spyware has

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