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It's hard to make things easy on Windows - it's law of nature.

It's actually not - if you try to avoid integrating in any way with the os. Shared-nothing apps are pretty nice.

SQL server and a few of the other behemoth apps seem to have a very hard time staying separate from windows which is annoying.

In Linux the design benefit is that there are package managers and the flaw is that there are many. Shipping a simple binary installer for multiple distributions is still tricky.

SQL Server has a heavy memory management dependency, pretty hard not to bake itself into the OS. That abstraction platform mentioned in the article is a godsend. They'll tighten up the Windows install over time, but Linux (ironically) gets all the juice for the first go-around.

> Shipping a simple binary installer for multiple distributions is still tricky.

Because you're bypassing the package manager. Packaging isn't all that hard, much easier than building your own binary installer that handles multiple platforms.

Right. My point was that it's easy to deploy to one or a couple of distributions but still painful to deploy for "Linux" without further specification. Meanwhile on windows their trainwreck of an installation system works for all windows from 95 usually.

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