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Under the hood (not de's or gui) what REALLY separates linux from windows? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 days ago by bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Is it just / ?

I kid. But really, besides "its all a file", if you take away the gui, is the only difference the syntax ? How libraries interact? How disks are mounted ?

If we stripped all ms's junk out and made windows open source, would we still prefer linux?

When you get to a very basic level, is one of them more efficiently coded?

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[-] Mordikan@kbin.earth 36 points 2 days ago

I think its easier and shorter to say what is the same between the two than different, but some things that are different:

  1. Filesystem (ex. Linux treats everything as a file, more flexibility in organization, more compatibility for differing systems, etc)
  2. Security Model (NTFS vs UNIX, selinux, ACLs, etc)
  3. File Execution (File extensions don't really matter in Linux - based on file permission not extension, ELF vs PE, etc)
  4. Kernel (Monolithic vs Hybrid kernel systems - Windows hands off to HAL vs the Linux kernel doing core functions)
  5. System Calls (Windows use Win32/NT APIs, Linux uses POSIX-compliant)

Performance is dependent on use case, but in general:

  1. Linux uses fewer system resources
  2. Linux has faster boot time
  3. Linux has better CPU/disk throughput
  4. Windows has better gaming driver support
  5. Linux has higher stability/control (hence why its the defacto server OS)

If we stripped all ms's junk out and made windows open source, would we still prefer linux?

In what context? For gaming maybe, but that's one single use. There is more to computers than video games, at least for the majority of Linux users. I wouldn't trust Windows on any server I run.

[-] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 13 points 1 day ago

Note: Gaming performance is purely based on money spent. There's no fundamental reason windows would have better gaming performance, it's just that there is more money being paid to engineers and vendors to support DirectX and related tooling.

Then there's the self-fulfilling aspect that, windows has the largest marketshare, so devs are going to spend the most money targeting it, so that they can get the most money in return, which means more people will use it, which leads to the high marketshare.

The ONLY reason Linux use is seeing the few percent blip in gaming is because Valve has dumped truckloads of cash into making it viable.

[-] tehn00bi@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

PlayStation proves gaming is just fine on Unix.

this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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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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