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Comment by OskarS | Hacker News Reader

Can you say with a straight face that if you were designing a system that had extremely high requirements of reliability that you would choose Windows over Linux? Like, all other things being equal? I'm sorry, but that would be an insane choice.

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Well, yes? Of course, not the consumer deployment of Windows. Part of ensuring reliability is establishing contracts with suppliers that shift liability to them, so they're incentivized to keep their stuff reliable. Can't exactly do that with Linux (RHEL notiwthstanding) and open source in general, which is why large enterprises have been so reluctant to adopt them in the past - they had to figure out how to fit OSS into the flow of liability and responsibility.

I guess it depends whether you want your system to work, or whether you just want it to be not your fault when it breaks

It's not as straightforward of a choice as it may seem. In theory Linux would be a better choice but there simply isn't the infrastructure or IT staffing in place to manage millions and millions of Linux desktops. I'm not saying it can't be done but for various reasons it hasn't been done and that's a major practical roadblock. Just from a staffing perspective alone if you hand millions of Linux desktops to life long Microsoftsies you're begging for disaster.

For sure, no question! There's a reason people choose Microsoft. My question was narrower, just the question on reliability (hence "all else being equal"). I don't think you can say that, leaving aside issues like this, that Windows is as or more reliable than Linux.

For instance, if you had to make deploy a mission critical server, assuming cost and other software was the same, would you choose Linux or Windows for reliability? Of course you would choose Linux.

Well, with the proliferation of systemd and all the nightmares it's caused me over the past decade, I actually might. But thankfully BSD is an option.

But Linux isn't immune from this exact sort of issue, though - these overgrown antivirus solutions run as kernel drivers in linux as well, and I have seen them cause kernel panics.

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