Comparing Windows 10 and Linux

For most users, the words “Win­dows” and “com­put­er” are actu­al­ly syn­ony­mous. Mean­while, oth­er oper­at­ing sys­tems exist and devel­op in par­al­lel. We com­mis­sioned our experts to eval­u­ate the usabil­i­ty of one of the ver­sions of Lin­ux in com­par­i­son with Win­dows 10.

System requirements

In prepar­ing Win­dows 10 to be its lat­est oper­at­ing sys­tem, Microsoft took opti­miza­tion seri­ous­ly. The OS has medi­um require­ments and can run even on fair­ly old com­put­ers.

Lin­ux Mint 19.1 “Tes­sa” Mate Edi­tion acts as a com­peti­tor to Win­dows 10. Both sys­tems are test­ed in 64-bit edi­tion.

Hard­ware con­fig­u­ra­tion require­ments do not dif­fer sig­nif­i­cant­ly. For com­fort­able work in both cas­es, you need at least 2 GB of RAM. Require­ments for hard disk space and screen res­o­lu­tion are min­i­mal and are impor­tant only at the stage of unpack­ing sys­tem files and instal­la­tion. Work­ing in the OS every day, no one will use a mon­i­tor with a res­o­lu­tion of 800x600 pix­els.

Installation

Instal­la­tion of mod­ern sys­tems does not require spe­cial skills from the user. All oper­a­tions are per­formed in graph­i­cal mode and are accom­pa­nied by detailed expla­na­tions.

Installing Win­dows 10 begins with the choice of local­iza­tion. We set the desired lan­guage para­me­ters and pro­ceed to the choice of edi­tion.

Five ver­sions of the OS are avail­able on the boot disk, with sev­er­al dif­fer­ent func­tion­al­i­ties. From the list below, you need to select the edi­tion for which there is a license key.

Hav­ing accept­ed the user agree­ment, we wait for unpack­ing and the end of copy­ing files to the hard dri­ve.

Con­sid­er­able time will have to be spent on the pri­va­cy set­tings of the oper­at­ing sys­tem. Win­dows 10 asks for per­mis­sion to track poten­tial user actions dur­ing the instal­la­tion phase and seeks to gain access to all pos­si­ble infor­ma­tion. In prin­ci­ple, noth­ing can be changed here. This OS has an entire sec­tion ded­i­cat­ed to pri­va­cy and its set­tings. Even if you can­cel all the per­mis­sions request­ed dur­ing the instal­la­tion, you will still have to dis­able many unnec­es­sary options.

The instal­la­tion of Lin­ux Mint begins with the launch of the so-called LiveCD. An abbre­vi­at­ed ver­sion of the OS that runs from a USB flash dri­ve or DVD dri­ve. The user can eval­u­ate the appear­ance and only after that pro­ceed with the direct instal­la­tion. It also begins with the choice of local­iza­tion.

One of the most impor­tant points is the con­sent to install third-par­ty soft­ware. It includes a set of video card dri­vers and codecs. Con­sent is required because some of this soft­ware is closed source and does not com­ply with a free license. By default, the item is already checked, because in the future it will ensure max­i­mum per­for­mance and cor­rect oper­a­tion of the OS.

The times when the user man­u­al­ly set the lay­out of the hard disk and had to under­stand its struc­ture are gone. Now the Lin­ux installer per­forms all oper­a­tions auto­mat­i­cal­ly, eval­u­at­ing the hard­ware con­fig­u­ra­tion. You can not change any­thing and agree to con­tin­ue the instal­la­tion.

At the last stage, while unpack­ing and copy­ing soft­ware pack­ages, the future user is offered a brief overview of the dis­tri­b­u­tion’s capa­bil­i­ties.

Appearance

The look of the Win­dows desk­top has­n’t changed much. The failed exper­i­ment with a ful­ly tiled inter­face did not find user sup­port and was scrapped. Microsoft has returned to the clas­sic look of the desk­top with a Con­trol Pan­el and a Start but­ton.

The Lin­ux Mint dis­tri­b­u­tion, devel­oped on the basis of Ubun­tu, has sev­er­al stan­dard graph­i­cal shells. Our experts used the Mate edi­tion, one of the sim­plest and most sta­ble desk­tops with high per­for­mance. It does not dif­fer much from Win­dows, which makes it eas­i­er for the user to adapt dur­ing the tran­si­tion. There is also a main con­trol pan­el, a but­ton to launch the main menu in the left cor­ner and an ana­logue of the sys­tem tray in the right.

Personalization

One of the very first actions of the user after installing the oper­at­ing sys­tem is asso­ci­at­ed with chang­ing its appear­ance. In Win­dows, the Per­son­al­iza­tion sec­tion serves this pur­pose. This con­tains all set­tings relat­ed to the desk­top. You can change wall­pa­pers, fonts, col­ors, and a host of oth­er options to cus­tomize the look and feel to suit your pref­er­ences.

Lin­ux Mint has sev­er­al lev­els of per­son­al­iza­tion options. The main one pro­vides for chang­ing the theme, includ­ing the col­or of the icons. Sev­er­al options are avail­able, includ­ing a dark back­ground. Here you can also change the desk­top wall­pa­per. The fonts used can be changed in a wide range. For exam­ple, for drop-down menus and win­dow dec­o­ra­tions, you can use dif­fer­ent styles.

The sec­ond lev­el allows you to use sev­er­al dif­fer­ent win­dow man­agers, chang­ing the basic behav­ior of win­dows and ani­ma­tions for actions. Addi­tion­al­ly, the user can cus­tomize the loca­tion of the con­trol but­tons. It is planned to place them in the upper right part, in the Win­dows style or in the left part, in the macOS style.

The last lev­el is for using addi­tion­al ani­ma­tion and 3D graph­ic effects. In this case, an addi­tion­al win­dow man­ag­er Com­piz is used, which is quite demand­ing on hard­ware resources.

Start Menu

The main Start menu in Win­dows 10 is a mix­ture of sev­er­al ear­li­er ver­sions. It uses a switch­able set of “live” tiles, and the list of pro­grams is sort­ed alpha­bet­i­cal­ly. An alter­na­tive menu with a list of quick tran­si­tions is opened by a key­board short­cut or by press­ing the right mouse but­ton.

The Mate GUI takes a sim­i­lar approach. All menus are divid­ed into three columns by default. The first con­tains links to quick tran­si­tions. Cen­tral con­tains appli­ca­tions grouped by pur­pose. The right col­umn dis­plays a list of pro­grams from the select­ed group. Addi­tion­al­ly, the user can con­fig­ure an alter­na­tive list con­sist­ing of the most pop­u­lar appli­ca­tions and sys­tem util­i­ties.

A sep­a­rate set­ting is designed to change the appear­ance of the main menu. If desired, the user can cre­ate their own menus or change the order of ele­ments in exist­ing ones.

Settings

Win­dows 10 has two con­trol pan­els. Clas­sic, used in all ver­sions of the oper­at­ing sys­tem and has not under­gone sig­nif­i­cant changes. Options can be expand­ed into one gen­er­al list or grouped into pre­de­fined cat­e­gories. The set­tings includ­ed in the groups are not dis­played, and the descrip­tion often does not give a clear idea of ​​the con­tent. Chaos adds the dupli­ca­tion avail­able in the cat­e­gories. For exam­ple, pow­er options are both in the Sys­tem and Secu­ri­ty and Hard­ware and Sound cat­e­gories.

The new pan­el that appeared in Win­dows 10 is sup­ple­ment­ed and expand­ed with each new build of the OS. In some cas­es, it still con­tains ref­er­ences to the clas­sic menu, but grad­u­al­ly becomes more con­ve­nient and func­tion­al. One can trace the desire of devel­op­ers to soon­er or lat­er col­lect all the set­tings in one place, there­by stop­ping users from throw­ing around all the nooks and cran­nies of the oper­at­ing sys­tem.

After the chaos cre­at­ed by Microsoft, the con­trol cen­ter used in the Lin­ux Mint dis­tri­b­u­tion seems to be an island of order and sta­bil­i­ty. All para­me­ters are clear­ly struc­tured into groups. Cat­e­gories are expand­ed, mak­ing it easy to find the sec­tion you need. This approach to the design of set­tings looks more con­ve­nient and con­tributes to the rapid adap­ta­tion of the user to an unfa­mil­iar oper­at­ing sys­tem.

File manager

The file man­ag­er is one of the main tools for work­ing in the oper­at­ing sys­tem. With it, you can nav­i­gate through the direc­to­ries of the hard dri­ve, work with exter­nal media and per­form var­i­ous oper­a­tions relat­ed to sav­ing and copy­ing data. On Win­dows, this role is per­formed by File Explor­er.

In Mint, the default file man­ag­er is Caja, which means “box” in Span­ish. In terms of func­tion­al­i­ty, it is very close to Explor­er, but has an impor­tant dif­fer­ence. Caja imple­ments tabs, allow­ing you to per­form move-copy oper­a­tions in a sin­gle win­dow. The mod­u­lar archi­tec­ture allows you to expand the capa­bil­i­ties, in par­tic­u­lar those relat­ed to work­ing with net­work resources, through plug-ins.

Browser

In Win­dows 10, Inter­net Explor­er has been replaced by Edge for a long time. In the next build of the OS, it should receive a major update relat­ed to the tran­si­tion to the Chromi­um engine.

Mint, like many oth­er Lin­ux dis­tri­b­u­tions, is used as the default brows­er by Fire­fox Quan­tum. Both of them have a mod­u­lar archi­tec­ture allow­ing the use of plu­g­ins to extend stan­dard fea­tures.

Update system

After the release of Win­dows 10, Microsoft was crit­i­cized for its rigid pol­i­cy in the area of ​​oper­at­ing sys­tem updates. In fact, the user has lost the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cus­tom instal­la­tion. By accept­ing the license agree­ment, each own­er of Win­dows agrees to receive all fix­es released for the OS. A use­ful inno­va­tion was the sys­tem of dis­trib­uted load­ing. By check­ing the appro­pri­ate item in the set­tings, you can receive updates not only from the offi­cial serv­er, but also from near­by com­put­ers. Thus, Microsoft has achieved a reduc­tion in the load on data cen­ters, and the user has received a gain in speed. Using the prin­ci­ples of peer-to-peer net­works allows you to deter­mine the clos­est and fastest source.

The Lin­ux Mint update man­ag­er can work both in auto­mat­ic and man­u­al mode. In the first case, new pack­ages are down­loaded and installed with­out user inter­ven­tion. An impor­tant fea­ture of Lin­ux oper­at­ing sys­tems is the abil­i­ty to “hot” updates with­out the need for a restart. In fact, the com­put­er only needs to be restart­ed if the ker­nel ver­sion is changed or the dis­tri­b­u­tion assem­bly is updat­ed.

The accel­er­a­tion of receiv­ing noti­fi­ca­tions is achieved by choos­ing the fastest of the exist­ing repos­i­to­ries. How­ev­er, it does not have to be in the same coun­try as the user. All pack­ages host­ed on mir­rors have the same local­iza­tion and it does not mat­ter where they are down­loaded from. The updat­ed appli­ca­tion will still work in the lan­guage that is the main lan­guage in the sys­tem.

Application installation

Win­dows 10 has two options for installing new pro­grams. You can down­load them from the Microsoft Store or down­load them as an instal­la­tion file. The lat­ter usu­al­ly has an EXE or MSI exten­sion. The sec­ond method is the most com­mon because it allows you to down­load the nec­es­sary soft­ware from devel­op­er sites, soft por­tals or online stores.

Lin­ux has a lot more choic­es. The eas­i­est option is to use the pro­gram man­ag­er. It works on the same prin­ci­ple as the Microsoft Store. The user selects the cat­e­go­ry of required soft­ware and receives a list of appli­ca­tions avail­able for instal­la­tion.

A slight­ly more com­pli­cat­ed way involves using a pack­age man­ag­er. The choice of soft­ware in this case will be even rich­er than in the first option. How­ev­er, to use it, the user must know the name of the required pack­age. For this rea­son, it is more suit­able for those who have been using Lin­ux for some time.

The last option is sim­i­lar to installing pro­grams in Win­dows. Fresh ver­sions of soft­ware do not imme­di­ate­ly get into the repos­i­to­ries. They are first checked for sta­bil­i­ty when inter­act­ing with oth­er OS com­po­nents in test builds. For this rea­son, on the devel­op­ers’ web­sites, the lat­est ver­sions of pro­grams are laid out in the form of instal­la­tion pack­ages for Lin­ux.

Here it is nec­es­sary to make a small digres­sion. Lin­ux has two main pack­age types: RPM and DEB. Both are relat­ed to the devel­op­ment of var­i­ous branch­es of the dis­tri­b­u­tion. The first has become wide­spread in ver­sions of oper­at­ing sys­tems based on Lin­ux Red Hat. The sec­ond one is used in Debian and oth­er oper­at­ing sys­tems based on it. Lin­ux Mint is based on sta­ble releas­es of Ubun­tu, which in turn belongs to the Dedi­an fam­i­ly. Soft­ware devel­op­ers usu­al­ly post both ver­sions of pack­ages, if nec­es­sary, sep­a­rat­ing them also by bit depth. For the dis­tri­b­u­tion in ques­tion, DEB files cre­at­ed for 64-bit Ubun­tu are suit­able.

The pack­age installer will auto­mat­i­cal­ly check for depen­den­cies and offer to install the mod­ules required for cor­rect oper­a­tion.

Office Applications

Microsoft releas­es the world’s most pop­u­lar office suite, Microsoft Office. It is dif­fi­cult to find a user who would not have heard any­thing about him at all. How­ev­er, it is not includ­ed with Win­dows 10. To work in Word text edi­tor or cre­ate tables in Excel, you need to pur­chase an Office 365 sub­scrip­tion or a boxed ver­sion of the pro­gram.

The Lin­ux Mint dis­tri­b­u­tion already includes a full-fledged Libre­Of­fice office soft­ware pack­age dis­trib­uted free of charge.

After installing the oper­at­ing sys­tem, the user has at his dis­pos­al the fol­low­ing appli­ca­tions:

1. base. An ana­logue of Access, a tool for cre­at­ing data­bas­es;

2. Calc. Excel ana­logue, spread­sheet edi­tor;

3. Draw. Vec­tor graph­ics edi­tor;

4. impress. Ana­log of Pow­er­Point, a pro­gram for cre­at­ing pre­sen­ta­tions;

5. Math. Edi­tor of math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las;

6. Writer. An ana­logue of Word, a word proces­sor.

All these pro­grams cer­tain­ly do not look as pre­sentable as those includ­ed in Microsoft Office. Out­ward­ly, they are more rem­i­nis­cent of Office XP, which has long since left the scene. How­ev­er, in terms of func­tion­al­i­ty, they are in no way infe­ri­or to the emi­nent com­peti­tor. The cre­at­ed doc­u­ments are saved in the Open­Doc­u­ment for­mat. A text file cre­at­ed in Writer will have an .odt exten­sion. This ensures full com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with Word doc­u­ments. Writer is able to open, edit and save them in both DOC and advanced DOCX for­mats.

As a small digres­sion, it is worth not­ing that the Open­Doc­u­ment for­mat is offi­cial­ly approved for use in the EU by GOST R ISO / IEC 26300–2010.

Multimedia features

Work, as you know, is not a wolf and will not run away into the for­est. Not every user will rush to cre­ate doc­u­ments first of all by dis­cov­er­ing a free office as part of the oper­at­ing sys­tem. A much more like­ly sce­nario would be to use the com­put­er as an enter­tain­ment cen­ter. Our experts test­ed the OS’s abil­i­ty to play pop­u­lar pho­to, video and music file for­mats out of the box.

Video

Test­ing was car­ried out for AVI, MKV and MP4 for­mats, which are the most com­mon for stor­ing movies.

On Win­dows 10, the default video view­ing app is Movies & TV. The pro­gram can work with local files and play con­tent via Wi-Fi from a home media serv­er. Instal­la­tion of addi­tion­al codecs to work with the for­mats in ques­tion was not required.

Lin­ux Mint comes pre­in­stalled with two video play­ers: XPlay­er and VLC. Both eas­i­ly coped with the play­back of the pro­posed con­tent.

VLC is more ver­sa­tile and is able to play video over the net­work, tak­ing it from a media serv­er or via a direct link from the Inter­net.

Music

The default music play­er in Win­dows 10 is the Groove Music app. I coped with the task of play­ing the MP3 file pro­posed by the experts with­out any prob­lems and did not require the instal­la­tion of addi­tion­al mod­ules.

An inno­va­tion in assem­bly 1809 was the appear­ance of the Yandex.Music ser­vice. After autho­riza­tion through social net­works or on the mail ser­vice of the same name, the user gets access to the online music col­lec­tion.

In Lin­ux Mint, the default music play­er is the Rhythm­box play­er. It han­dled the MP3 file with­out any prob­lems.

The prod­ucts of the ubiq­ui­tous Yan­dex have not yet pen­e­trat­ed Lin­ux dis­tri­b­u­tions. How­ev­er, the abil­i­ty to lis­ten to Inter­net radio in Rhythm­box is pro­vid­ed. To do this, you can use Last.fm or Libre.fm accounts. In addi­tion, the pro­gram comes pre-installed with 13 free music radio sta­tions that do not require a sub­scrip­tion.

Peripheral support

The times when beard­ed linu­soids man­u­al­ly wrote dri­vers for con­nect­ing a print­er or scan­ner are long gone. Lin­ux works great with almost all exter­nal devices. An excep­tion can only be unique sam­ples pro­duced in small batch­es.

Sup­port is pro­vid­ed at the oper­at­ing sys­tem ker­nel lev­el. This means that the device can sim­ply be con­nect­ed to a com­put­er for Lin­ux to detect it and start work­ing with it. There is no need even for the dri­ver instal­la­tion famil­iar to Win­dows users.

Games

Win­dows tra­di­tion­al­ly has the best sup­port for games among exist­ing oper­at­ing sys­tems. Once again, sta­tis­tics from Valve, the devel­op­er of the Steam gam­ing ser­vice, help to make sure of this. In the first place in terms of use is Win­dows 10 in the 64-bit edi­tion. The share of Lin­ux users is more than 100 times small­er and at the same time shows a neg­a­tive trend.

In this mat­ter, Win­dows has absolute pri­ma­cy and no one can threat­en its posi­tions yet. How­ev­er, it would be wrong to say that Lin­ux users are com­plete­ly deprived of gam­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties.

First­ly, in the pro­gram man­ag­er there is a “Games” sec­tion with pret­ty good con­tent. In terms of graph­ics qual­i­ty, they are infe­ri­or, but over­all they look pret­ty decent.

Sec­ond­ly, the same Valve, whose sta­tis­tics are giv­en at the begin­ning of this sec­tion, released a Steam ver­sion for Lin­ux. Some games are offi­cial­ly approved by the com­pa­ny for use and marked with the SteamOS icon. Anoth­er fea­ture — Steam­Play is under test­ing. In fact, it is an adapt­ed pro­gram of Wine, a Win­dows emu­la­tor in a Lin­ux envi­ron­ment.

Linux usage statistics

Com­par­i­son of oper­at­ing sys­tems would not be com­plete with­out sta­tis­ti­cal data reflect­ing the share of their use in desk­top sys­tems.

Glob­al­ly, Lin­ux is used by just over 1.5% of users. At the same time, the share of Win­dows exceeds three-quar­ters of the total.

In the EU, the num­ber of Lin­ux users is even small­er. Win­dows has almost a monop­oly. This OS is used by 85.5% of users.

Obvious pros and obvious cons

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, Lin­ux has been con­sid­ered extreme­ly com­plex for the aver­age user and unsuit­able for every­day use. This opin­ion was formed at the dawn of its devel­op­ment, when even sim­ple oper­a­tions required com­mand line skills. Now this idea of ​​Lin­ux is noth­ing more than an estab­lished myth. Most mod­ern dis­tri­b­u­tions allow you to work in a con­ve­nient and famil­iar graph­i­cal inter­face. When com­par­ing with Win­dows 10, our experts focused on the main and most request­ed fea­tures that the user access­es on a dai­ly basis.

Let’s eval­u­ate the ben­e­fits that you can get when using Lin­ux:

1. free. Lin­ux dis­tri­b­u­tions with their includ­ed soft­ware are dis­trib­uted under a free license and their use does not require pay­ment or roy­al­ties;

2. absence of virus­es. There is no need to divert com­put­er resources to con­stant mon­i­tor­ing of its state;

3. flex­i­bil­i­ty of set­tings. If desired, Lin­ux can be turned into a kind of Win­dows or macOS, or you can cre­ate your own unique design style;

4. sta­bil­i­ty. The oper­at­ing sys­tem can work for months with­out reboots and is kept up to date due to the “hot” instal­la­tion of updates.

How­ev­er, there are no ide­al sys­tems. The dis­ad­van­tages of Lin­ux include the absence of some pop­u­lar or nec­es­sary pro­grams for Win­dows users. If Pho­to­shop can be eas­i­ly replaced by the free Gimp, then there are no full-fledged ana­logues of Auto­CAD for Lin­ux.

Results

It is impos­si­ble to say unequiv­o­cal­ly that one of the sys­tems con­sid­ered is supe­ri­or to the oth­er in all respects. Each has its own mer­its and demer­its. A good way out of the sit­u­a­tion for those who want to try out Lin­ux can be the option of shar­ing two oper­at­ing sys­tems. The pos­si­bil­i­ty of choice in this case is real­ized at the stage of load­ing. For games and spe­cial­ized soft­ware, you can still use Win­dows, and down­load Lin­ux to work in office appli­ca­tions or the Inter­net. Such a bun­dle of two oper­at­ing sys­tems can be a con­ve­nient tran­si­tion­al step. Hav­ing mas­tered anoth­er OS and eval­u­at­ing its capa­bil­i­ties from their own expe­ri­ence, some users com­plete­ly switch to Lin­ux.