| Windows |
| Linux |
|---|
| Ease of Install | On Windows Server 2003 and prior, the installation is divided into two stages; the first text-mode, the second graphical.[20] On Windows Vista and newer, the installation is single stage, and graphical. Some older versions require third party drivers (for example, by using driver floppies disks or slipstreaming the drivers and creating a new installation CD) if using a large number of SATA or SATA2 drives or RAID arrays.[21] |
| Varies greatly by distribution. General purpose oriented distributions offer a live CD or GUI installer (SuSE,Debian,Pardus, Pclinuxos, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora etc.), others offer a menu-driven installer (Vector Linux, Slackware, Debian) while others, targeting more specialized groups, require source to be copied and compiled (Gentoo). The system can also be built completely from scratch, directly from source code (Linux from Scratch). |
| Install time | Varies based on version installed, hardware configuration, and whether it's an update or clean installation. Typically ranges from about 20 minutes to about an hour.[25][26] |
| Differs heavily depending on distribution. Is generally around 20-40 minutes for general-use distributions like Ubuntu.[citation needed] In case of source based distributions installation may take up to days. |
| Drivers | Often drivers must be installed separately. If not included in install media they must be provided by manufacturer. Most common drivers are available in the Windows install or after a quick Internet update. The process of installing drivers is mostly automated. |
| Most free drivers available are included in most distributions or can be found in online archives. Some devices (e.g. graphics cards, wireless adapters) do not have open-source drivers available due to licensing issues, but proprietary drivers are available for download from manufacturers or special archives. Some devices allow using Windows drivers. For some devices no usable drivers are available. Most special-purpose drivers must be compiled by the user manually. Time has been invested in centralizing and automating some driver installation through a package manager.
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| Installation via Live Environments | May be installed through WinPE and BartPE. However, only the former is endorsed by Microsoft. |
| Almost all Linux distributions now have a live CD that may be used for install.[27]
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| Pre-installed software | Some multimedia and home use software (IE, Media Player, Notepad, WordPad, Paint…) plus OEM bundled software. Windows Vista Includes IE7, Windows Mail, Windows Media Center, etc. depending on which edition is purchased. It does not include Office suites or advanced multimedia software. |
| All main distributions contain numerous programs: multimedia, graphics, internet, office suites, games, system utilities and alternative desktop environments. Some distributions specialise in education, games, or security. Most distributions give users the choice of which bundled programs to install, if any.
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| Not pre-installed software | A large pool of both proprietary software (including shareware and freeware) and free software. The programs usually come with the required libraries and are normally installed easily. Most programs must be individually installed. Deinstallation is equally easy, but components and registry entries can be left behind if a program has been equipped with an older uninstaller. |
| A large pool of free software and some proprietary software. Ports of proprietary Windows software also exist. Using free Windows compatibility layers like Wine, a large number of Windows software can also be run on Linux Distribution-included programs may be very easily installed in large batches with dependencies to shared libraries being taken care of. Packaging systems allow easy installation of common/supported programs. Other programs can be installed easily, but programs that are not pre-compiled (compiling from source) require users to be familiar with the UNIX shell.
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| Partitioning | Expanding NTFS partitions is possible without problems, and on Vista it is possible to shrink partitions as well. Dynamic Disks provide dynamic partitioning. Third party tools are available that have more features than the built-in partitioning tools. |
| Some file systems support resizing partitions without losing data. LVM and EVMS provide dynamic partitioning. All Linux distributions have bundled partitioning software such as fdisk or gparted
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| File systems | Natively supported: NTFS, FAT, ISO 9660, UDF, and others; 3rd-party drivers available for ext2, ext3, reiserfs, HFS, and others |
| Natively supported: ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS, FAT, ISO 9660, UDF, NFS, and others; many additional filesystems (including NTFS using NTFS-3g) are available using FUSE. Archives and FTP sites also can be mounted as filesystems.
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| Boot Loader | May boot to multiple operating systems through the Windows Boot Manager, in Windows Vista and newer; or the Microsoft boot loader, NTLDR, in Windows Server 2003 and prior. Graphical configurations tools are available, such as EasyBCD for the Windows Boot Manager and MSConfig for NTLDR. |
| May boot to multiple operating systems through LILO or GRUB. With these, it is possible to choose between multiple installed kernel images at boottime. Graphical configuration tools for GRUB are available including KGRUBEditor[29] (KDE) and GrubConf [30] (GNOME). GRUB can also be configured at boottime via the GRUB prompt.
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