| ▲ | aleph_minus_one 9 hours ago | |
Very important for business customers: - It is very "standardized" (i.e. there exist no distributions that do things differently from each other). - It cares about binary backward compatibility: it is nearly always possible to run a binary from 30 years ago, and if you are willing to invest some own effort, eben running Win16 binaries can often be run. Compare this to GUI applications on GNU/Linux. - The operating system and the applications are very separated. I can basically install every version of an application that I want: If there exists a newer release of some software than what the "distribution" (which of course does not exist in the Windows world) provides that you want to try out: install it now, you don't have to wait for your distribution. There is also no nightmare that some shared library versions have to fit the ones provides by the distribution. Similarly, I you want to stay with an older version of a software for a longer time: go for it. It is a very common situation that for some pieces of software, you have very specific requirements which version you want: with Windows, this is very easy, while on GNU/Linux this is - in my experience - a nightmare for unexperienced users. - If you build one software release on Windows, it will run on basically every Windows computer (the typical thing that you have to do at most is to additional install a runtime provided by Microsoft (e.g. for C++ or C#)). No consideration necessary how to handle each distribution. | ||