windows vs linux

Gamers Nexus benchmarks GPU gaming performance on Linux using the Bazzite OS, an exploratory first step toward establishing a Linux testing methodology. It compares results against Windows and notes where Linux still falls short.

A 2007 side-by-side demo comparing Windows Vista's Aero interface with Ubuntu running Beryl/Compiz, showing effects such as the desktop cube and burning windows.

A Microsoft Build 2019 session in which the WSL team explains the new WSL 2 architecture, which runs a real Linux kernel alongside Windows on a hypervisor. It covers faster file performance, Linux file access from Windows and better application support.

Microsoft's short announcement video for the new Windows Terminal, a modern terminal app for Command Prompt, PowerShell and WSL. It is a stylized trailer for the unreleased project.

Daniel Stone, a longtime X and Wayland developer, explains at linux.conf.au 2013 why X11's design became untenable and what motivated Wayland. The talk walks through X's history and accumulated cruft.

An animated, profane rant critiquing Windows 8, especially its touch-first interface on desktop PCs. The author draws on a background in tech journalism to lay out the UX problems.

NCommander investigates why Space Cadet Pinball disappeared from Windows Vista, building on Raymond Chen's explanation about 64-bit incompatibility. He tests it on 64-bit Windows including Itanium and walks through the debugging.

Polylog explains how algorithms can be turned into circuits and encoded as satisfiability problems, which lets you effectively run them backwards. It uses this to motivate breaking RSA, general reductions to SAT, and what P vs NP is really asking.

Dave Plummer, a retired Microsoft engineer who wrote Task Manager, responds to the claim that Windows sucks. He describes how he would fix common annoyances, in what he calls a love letter to Windows wrapped in a rant.

Linus Torvalds tells the story of Linux in a 2001 talk at the Computer History Museum, from writing code as a graduate student in Helsinki in the early 1990s to becoming an icon of open source. It covers the project's origins, its growth, and his views on licensing and kernel design.

A 27c3 talk on the Linux desktop (GNOME) by Wolfgang Draxinger, repeatedly interrupted and corrected by Lennart Poettering from the audience. The description notes much of the talk's content is disputed.

Andrew Kelley's Zig SHOWTIME talk on an experiment to ship static Linux executables that can do graphics and gaming, followed by an interview. It covers the problems of Linux binary stability, dynamic linking and the graphics ABI.

Linus Tech Tips explains how Windows Modern Standby causes laptops to drain battery while asleep, arguing it makes Windows laptops hard to recommend compared to MacBooks.

A former Microsoft SDET with 15 years on Windows gives his view on why Windows 10 updates keep shipping with bugs. He points to changes in how the company tests its software.

A short demo showing slow 2D drawing in the Windows 7 GUI compared with XP. It attributes the slowdown to the display driver model lacking hardware accelerated GDI.

PewDiePie describes switching to Linux and encourages viewers to do the same. It is a casual, enthusiastic video aimed at a mainstream audience.

Linus Tech Tips starts a series in which Linus and Luke move their home workstations to Linux. This episode has each pick a distro and try to get a game running on it, and Linus ends up breaking his Pop!_OS install.

A short clip from the 2013 LinuxCon Linux Kernel Panel in which Linus Torvalds is asked about being approached to insert a backdoor into Linux. He answers no verbally while nodding yes, which became a much-shared moment.

A 74-minute video of upgrading Windows 1.0 through every release up to Windows 8 on a real netbook rather than in a virtual machine.

TheRasteri upgrades a single PC through every Windows version, from early releases through Windows 10, testing that old software keeps running. It is an updated version of the Chain of Fools experiment.

The Browser Company's CTO explains how the team is building the Arc browser for Windows using Swift. It covers the de-risking work and why they believe it is feasible.

Tom Scott explains why Windows does not let you name a file CON, tracing the reserved device names back to backwards compatibility with DOS.

Enderman gets Windows 11 running on a Pentium 4 system with a Radeon HD 5870 and 8 GB of DDR2. It explores how an unsupported, ancient CPU can be made to work by using the rare last Pentium 4 variant and a registry flag.

TED curator Chris Anderson interviews Linus Torvalds about his personality, his engineer's pragmatism, and the creation of Linux and Git. Torvalds also discusses taste in code and why he open sourced Linux.

Chris Pirillo has his father try Windows 8 for the first time to see how ordinary users cope with the new interface.

Ronald Minnich of Google explains how UEFI firmware is a large closed attack surface and describes Google's work replacing it with Linux-based boot firmware. It also touches on Intel ME and other security coprocessors.

Matthew Garrett's linux.conf.au 2012 talk covers EFI and UEFI from the Linux point of view: why the PC BIOS was bad, what EFI changes, the issues it brings, and Secure Boot.

A short clip parodying Windows Vista's cancel-or-allow security prompts, in the style of Apple's Mac vs PC ads.

Dirk Hohndel explains why the Subsurface dive log project migrated from Gtk to Qt, the obstacles encountered, and advice for other applications frustrated with Gtk. It is a linux.conf.au 2014 talk.

Excerpts from Linus Torvalds's DebConf 14 talk on why desktop Linux struggles. He covers application distribution, distros breaking backwards compatibility, wasted package management effort and how Windows does app distribution better.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's Git Merge 2016 talk on how the Linux kernel is developed, how fast it moves, and how git and email workflows keep it manageable. He is the stable kernel maintainer.

Dave Plummer interviews Dave Cutler, architect of VMS and Windows NT, in a roughly three-hour conversation about his career and the history of Windows.

Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, in which a psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet with an alien intelligence and meets his dead wife there. It is the full movie, uploaded by Mosfilm.

TheRasteri installs MS-DOS and Windows 1.0, then upgrades in place through nearly every Windows version up to Windows 7, checking which programs survive. Even Doom from 1993 still runs at the end.

Eric Parker connects a fresh Windows XP machine to the internet in 2024 to see how quickly it gets infected with malware. He documents the dangers of running an unpatched legacy OS online.

Dave2D reviews the Lenovo Legion Go S running Valve's SteamOS instead of Windows, calling it the first true competitor to the Steam Deck. He compares handheld gaming performance and experience across the two operating systems.

A very short clip of Bill Gates hitting a Blue Screen of Death while demonstrating plug and play on Windows 98 on stage.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's Linaro keynote on contributing to the Linux kernel, explaining why maintainers prefer upstreamed code and how they view contributions.

A one-minute 1986 promo of Microsoft Windows 1.0 presented by Steve Ballmer, with a hyperbolic price pitch ending in the tag line about Nebraska.

Peter Hutterer's linux.conf.au 2020 talk on creating libinput, the unified userspace input library, and the difficulties of handling the many quirks of input devices.