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Comment by benj111 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not up on my current windows security, but windows has been dominating for decades, much of which it's security was non existent, being originally a single user system. Linux being a nix is multi user from the ground up.

So you seem to be making a conclusion that isn't warranted.

That isn't to say any of this is wrong per se. Just that being the best does not necessarily lead to success.

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Fair enough, but I think many people miss that something can be suboptimal in one way and very optimal in another. As an example, plenty of people here hail ffmpeg as the most optimal way to convert videos between formats, and for the technically inclined it sure is. Despite that, probably 99% of people that have ever needed to convert a video haven't touched it/don't know its name and never will because its interface is totally suboptimal. "It is the best and not successful" can be read as a true statement, but it leaves out that it is the best in this one sense and is far from the best in another sense.

To bring this back to the point I have found that AD is well documented, functions generally the same everywhere, and has an intuitive enough interface that you can get not-super-techy interns on the helpdesk up to speed on reseting passwords in it in short order. I couldn't say the same for any Linux management system I've touched, so even though you could say "system management on Linux is the best" and have that be a true statement, you're still missing where it fails and why that area matters to businesses.

I don't think we disagree. Problem is Linux users, of which I'm one, self selected to reject that ease because it's limiting. There's still a tension now, eg Gnome that is insistent on going all Mac in removing all options.

My personal suspicion is that you aren't going to get Linux to become what the windows users want it to be without it stopping being Linux. We've seen this with Android. So in some ways the rejection of centralisation on the Linux community is the thing that keeps it being Linux, for better or worse.

NT was designed as a multi-user system from the ground up.

Right but windows also aims to be backwards compatible which means it was trying to run things designed for a single user system undermining protections.

That makes absolutely no sense.

'vim' wasn't designed for multi-user use. Nor was emacs.

Applications don't need to somehow be "designed" for multi-user systems. It's up to the underlying system to enforce application isolation in various ways, which NT has and does.

Does vim expect to be able to delete files in /bin?

If vim tried to create, modify and delete files willy nilly It would quickly run into problems. I would guess vim keeps it's temp files in /tmp and config files in ~/.vimrc?

Windows doesn't/didn't have any of this. If you want to be compatible with lotus123 and lotus123 writes it's tmp files to the root directory, you need to keep it writable, or you break lotus123.

Windows handled this via virtualization[0]. What you assume is false because it was specifically planned for by Microsoft.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...

Uac is the thing that broke lots of things back in the vista days.

'planned' is a bit strong when it had to be added after the fact.

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