Windows

Linux

Windows is a proprietory Operating System (OS) of the Microsoft Corporation.

Linux is an open source Operating System that comes in various flavors from many different companies and organizations worldwide. It is based on the UNIX operating system.

It is a commercial product and prices can vary from $50 to several thousand dollars for the server range product.

The standard linux distributions are available for free use and circulation. There are some packages developed by companies that are commercial products.

It is the most popular operating system worldwide covering over 95% of desktops.

It is a fairly new deployment as a desktop, though it is gaining in popularity.

3 rd Party hardware and software vendors design products to work with Windows Operating systems as it is the most popular OS.

3 rd Party applications on the Linux platform are fewer in comparison but it is fast gaining ground. The newer linux distributions make hardware detection and installation much easier than previous versions.

Highly susceptible to viruses and malaware.

Highly immune to viruses and malaware.

Reliability is low and the “blue screen of death” is a frequent sight for windows users.

It is a highly reliable OS though it can produce, in rare instances, file system corruption due to system or power failures.

Windows machines are adequate for routine desktop applications but fail as Servers under heavy network load.

Linux servers work very well under fairly high network loads.

Being a closed source application, developers and users around the world cannot contribute towards enhancing the system and have to rely on the company to do so.

It's open source nature allows users to look at the code and contribute to code development and fixing bugs.

The FAT filesystem and the newer NTFS filesystem are not highly reliable and not adequate for demanding server applications.

The ext2 filesystem gets it performance from having an asynchronous mount and is fairly reliable.

Microsoft has excellent vendor relationships and there are thousands of applications available for Windows.

Only now have commericial applications for Linux increased, though they lack many of the features of the applications developed for windows based systems.

Development tools are few and have to be purchased seperately.

Linux includes a number of development tools and compilers for every common programming language.

The free applications for windows are limited and not open source.

There are a large number of free applications and programs available for Linux.

Microsoft products are tightly integrated together to work seamlessly. Office Productivity Suite, Collaboration Software etc require very little installation and configuration time.

Since the applications are developed by various sources, installation and configuration takes more time than windows though newer “windows style” installer applications are being developed.

Highly popular as a desktop.

Highly popular as a server.