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portlander52232

You pretty much just reiterated his point for him.

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His point is that the entire Unix ecosystem should be maintained as a single cathedral?

You mean either 'eco system' or 'echo chamber', both of which describe the unix community.

yeah, typo. i meant ecosystem.

I think I'll start using the term "echo system"

Windows is maintained as a single... (I won't say "cathedral")

"Windows-the-operating-system" is, but "Windows-the-distro" is not. He's specifically mentioning Firefox, so his argument is not restricted to the core operating system.

Windows is like a decent catholic cathedral in the middle of Mogadishu.

*nix is like 50 chapels using two customized holy books in mos eisley.

Linus shot first.

Actually, it only really looks like that on the outside. The internal organising principles are a mess, and that mess shows in the design.

Windows also breaks existing workflows and software with every new release, and then cuts support in less than a decade.

True, but sometimes those "breaks" are good things (Vista to 7 was nothing but improvement). And generally, Microsoft will support their releases for longer than a decade. XP had over 13 years of extended support, and Windows 7 will have 11 years of extended support. Even Vista, one of the worst OS releases from Microsoft, is still in extended support for another two years.[1]

Contrast that to major (LTS) releases from Ubuntu, which can be from 3 to 5 years, and only 9 to 18 months for non-LTS releases.[2] And Ubuntu is one of the kings of bleeding-edge breakage in the Linux-based OS world, surpassed only by Arch in my experience.

All that said, it's not all rosy in the Windows world, and not all thorns in the Ubuntu world. I just wanted to point out some facts to counter your misinformation.

[1]: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle

[2]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Windows still runs software from the 1980s and 1990s without much complaint. DOS software, Windows 3.1 software...

Amusingly, you can run that software under Linux also.

Not really. The decision to require applications to open ports, as opposed to just bind them, broke pretty much all networked software on Windows in the 00s. That's just one example where software may run but doesn't work. It's complicated.

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