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Comment by OlivierLi | Hacker News Reader

OSes are complicated and gigantic engineering projects.

Some of them are most definitely better than others in some respects. Saying that they are all absolutely equal is like declaring every CPU ever designed completely equal.

It's true that most users will be well served by most OSes but that's more a statement about users than about OSes.

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I think statements like this pay too much attention to implementation details. Their whole point of software is to serve the users, so when we (the users) are able to accomplish our tasks with it, it's good enough. And I don't see very many important tasks that one OS can accomplish better than another.

I'm right there with you when talking about web programming and the likes.

My main interests are system and games programming though so there might be a case of different points of views here.

I'm just imagining a situation where someone needs their OS to be realtime for example. They're not going to be swayed by the "All options are equal when seen from afar" argument.

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I think we might not be on the same page as to what Real-time means : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system

Well, process and thread scheduling can make a very noticeable difference. Years ago, a few guys decided to revamp the Linux kernel's "good enough" thread scheduler into an actually nice one. The first iteration could handle creating and destroy 100,000 threads in 3 seconds on a box that used to take hours. Lately there have been benchmarks relating to interactivity of desktop programs, timing how long it takes for a program to respond to input. This varies dramatically depending on what priorities the kernel gives to various processes (when under load).

Implementation details can make a difference in how nice a system is to use.

True, but I'm under the impression that all major OSes are evening out in performance, and will continue to over the next decade until there's basically no noticeable difference.

A lot of the comments around here are digressing into details about user experience of the desktop versions of various operating systems. The original comment was about StackOverflow running on Windows, so the discussion should be more about server rather than desktop experiences. Some people may be surprised to hear that StackOverflow runs on Windows servers because they may have heard a lot of stories a decade ago about Windows servers performing unpredictably under load compared to Linux. I know I did. So I did hear of a server OS accomplishing things better than another server OS. Anecdotal, yes, but there have been improvements to Windows servers since then, and obviously SO is doing well running on them, and I'm sure some people would like to hear about that.

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